In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

In an interesting article on ForeignPolicy.com, “Swine Flu: Twitter’s Power To Misinform”, Evgeny Morozov argues that “despite all the recent Twitter-enthusiasm about this platform’s unique power to alert millions of people in decentralized and previously unavailable ways, there are quite a few reasons to be concerned about Twitter’s role in facilitating an unnecessary global panic about swine [...]

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Monica Schoch-Spana of the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity, one of the (if not ‘the’) leading authorities on citizen preparedness and engagement, did an interesting interview on the radio show, Homeland Security Inside & Out. In it, she makes some recommendations to the new Administration on bolstering public preparedness and engagement. This week’s show [...]

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Stanford University Business School Professor Lawrence M. Wein has an interesting Op-Ed article, “Neither Snow, Nor Rain, Nor Anthrax…,” in today’s New York Times in which he supports the use of Postal Service mail carriers to deliver prophylactic antibiotics to the public in the event of an anthrax attack. In the piece (registration may be required), Wein lays out the [...]

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If you want to monitor what infectious diseases might be in your area or just check out a cool preparedness 2.0/public health application, take a look at www.healthmap.org.
Created by a research software developer Clark Freifield and a professor of pediatrics John Brownstein from Boston’s Children’s Hospital, HealthMap ”brings together disparate data sources to achieve unified and comprehensive view of current global state of [...]

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Thanks to John Bowen’s Hometown Security blog, I learned about an interesting citizen preparedness development —  the Florida legislature’s passage of the “Emergency Prescription Refill Bill” to help citizens store medicine for major emergencies. The legislation would “require all insurers and managed-care organizations to suspend refill-too-soon restrictions when a patient seeks a refill” if their county is under a [...]

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