[medinformatics] Web Communities Serve as Early Warning for Disease Outbreaks

[Medical Informatics News]

Recently, the ability of the Internet to serve as an early-warning system for emerging
disease outbreaks*was made clear in an ordinary yet*unlikely way: with a forwarded e-mail about a sickness
caused by a tummy tuck. From Health Day/Yahoo News:

Last spring, Dr. Eric Granowitz had asked a colleague for advice in treating a patient with a rare bacterial
infection. The colleague forwarded an e-mail she had received from Emerging Infections Network (EIN), which is a
subscription-only Internet network called a listserv. Attached to the bottom of the e-mail was yet another e-mail
from a doctor in New York City, detailing what looked to be a strikingly similar case.

”I was obviously suspicious, so I phoned the doctor [at Columbia in New York City] and he contacted his patient,
and indeed it was a match,” related Granowitz, who is an assistant professor of medicine at Baystate-Tufts School of
Medicine in Springfield, Mass. Both patients, it turned out, had had recent tummy tucks performed at the same clinic
in the Dominican Republic. Both patients had become seriously infected with Mycobacterium abscessus.

A quick check into Columbia’s system found three more cases linked to the same clinic. At that point, Granowitz
and the second doctor, Neville D. Clynes, contacted the New York City Department of Health and the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only 24 hours
had elapsed since their first telephone conversation.


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