Today Microsoft in partnership with Emory University unveiled the H1N1 Flu Response Center to help people experiencing symptoms of sickness to triage themselves, thereby keeping ERs unclogged for those who might really need clinical help. We participated today in a conference call with David Cerino, General Manager, Microsoft Health Solutions Group and Dr. Arthur Kellermann, Professor of Emergency Medicine and Associate Dean at Emory School of Medicine about this free public health service.
The simple website poses a series of questions based on three levels of assessment developed by Emory with guidance from CDC recommendations. Using basic English, that just about anyone can understand and what a primary care physician would be asking, a series of questions is presented. First, the system identifies whether you meet the CDC criteria of flu. And if so, it proceeds to look for symptoms of potentially severe illness, immediately suggesting you to see a doc. If the illness is not severe enough, the questions then try to identify associated risk factors of becoming sick with the flu, finally leading to a recommendation of whether to seek professional help. Currently operational for people 12 years of age and older, the system should be functional to include children in the next few days. Additionally, Microsoft promises to soon include services from TelaDoc, linking patients with real physicians for further assessment of their condition.
Link: Microsoft H1N1 Flu Response Center…
Public Health Archives
Microsoft Unveils H1N1 Swine Flu Response Center
“Outbreaks Near Me”: Practical Epidemiology for The iPhone
For the last three years we’ve been covering HealthMap, an online tool that tracks the spread of infectious disease, as reported from a number of credible sources (see flashbacks below). Now researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab have combined the resources of HealthMap with the networking and geolocation abilities of the iPhone to create a portable application that can keep you aware of disease outbreaks around you. The app will even raise an alarm when it realizes you, for example, entered an area with a high rate of recent reports of H1N1.
The new application also features an option for users to submit an outbreak report. This will enable individuals in cities and countries around the world to interact with the HealthMap team and participate in the public health surveillance process. Users may take photos – of situations and scenarios of, and/or leading to, disease – with their iPhone and submit them to the HealthMap system for review and eventual posting as an alert on the worldwide map.
Innovative New Sensor May Help Detect Freshness of Store Food
Consumers nowadays do not have any technology to accurately assess the freshness of fruits, vegetables, and meat in their local supermarkets. As such, we find ourselves squeezing melons, smelling peaches, and looking for the correct color on mangoes. Now German scientists are working on a device that can estimate food freshness using metal oxide sensors.
The system has been developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institutes for Molecular Biology and Applied Ecology IME in Schmallenberg and for Physical Measurement Techniques IPM in Freiburg. It checks gas emissions on-line – directly in the warehouse for instance. “We have brought together various technologies based on the use of metal oxide sensors, similar to those installed in cars, for example, to close ventilation vents when driving through a tunnel. Researchers at IPM have developed these sensors further. If a gas flows over the sensor, at temperatures of 300 to 400°C, it will burn at the point of contact. The subsequent exchange of electrons changes the electrical conductivity,” explains Dr. Mark Bücking, Head of Department at IME. “Before the gas reaches these sensors, it has to go through a separation column with polymers. Certain substances are already filtered out here.” A prototype of the analysis equipment already exists. Initial tests were promising – the system measures the volatile substances just as sensitively as conventional equipment used in food laboratories.
Fraunhofer Researchers Propose New Air Raid Siren System
German researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Technological Trend Analysis INT believe that current methods of public announcement during emergencies are insufficient. Air raid sirens have been dismantled across much of the Western World. To bridge this apparent gap in making lots of noise in a disaster, the researchers suggest linking car horns to a public network that would activate them if something is terribly wrong. To us it seems like this is a recipe for further disaster as drivers in and around the honking cars can get startled and get into multitude of accidents. In addition, as any New Yorker knows, when many cars are going off, folks are just using their horns as a non-prescription stress reliever.
In recent years, different individual solutions for warning systems have been developed. Cell-broadcast systems can send mass SMS messages to mobile phones. Smoke detectors, radio-controlled clocks and weather stations equipped with radio receivers can also trigger alarm. Despite the high distribution rate of some of these devices, it cannot be ensured that a warning reaches the entire population. Only individual persons or households would be warned, and only if the devices are on standby 24/7/365. Today, fire brigades and disaster protection agencies would rather want the sirens back. However, the resulting costs would amount to several 100 million Euros for German federal and state governments, which share the responsibility for civil protection.
TruTags Drug and Food Authentication System to Help Ensure You Get What You Pay For
Pharmaceutical counterfeiting has been growing into a serious problem over the years, and RFID (radio frequency identification) based techniques have been implemented into pill bottle caps to guarantee authenticity. The problem, of course, is that this approach doesn’t identify the genuine nature of the pills themselves. Now Cellular Bioengineering, a company out of Honolulu, Hawaii, has developed a method to manufacture tiny silicon dioxide (SiO2) particles, called TruTags™, each of which can have a unique light signature when observed with a special device. Being cheaper to manufacture and safe for consumption, the company believes that TruTags may become regular practice to tag not only drugs, but also foods, and maybe even things like toothpaste and diaper creams.
From the product page:
Advertisement
New Emergency Preparedness Simulator Points Out Areas That Need Improvement
Preparing a regional public health system for emergency situations is difficult because one has to find vulnerable points without prior experience of similar situations. By creating a fairly realistic simulator, NYU researchers modeled New York City’s public health response to a sarin gas attack and identified a few cracks in the system. The computer program, called Plan C, may serve as a tool for other cities to stress test their own hospital systems for various potential disasters.
The article, “A Novel Approach to Multihazard Modeling and Simulation,” is based on the authors’ test of the NYU computerized disaster simulation framework known as “Plan C” with a hypothetical malicious sarin release in several Manhattan locations. With the input of city demographic information, hospital resource and public transit data, the results showed that under certain circumstances, up to 22,000 individuals might become exposed, leading to 178 intensive care unit admissions.
“The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions”
Population monitoring has great potential benefits for disease tracking, especially during epidemics, and with a bit of technology it’s possible to do this in a comprehensive manner. Welcome to preparations for a 1984 Japan, where a pilot program will track the movement of 2,000 volunteers via GPS and identify when any of them crossed paths with others that later became ill with a contagious disease. No doubt the medical benefit of such a system on a large scale can save lives by the thousand. But once completed, it’s hard to ignore the possibilities of what the tracking system could otherwise be used for in the future.
From the Pink Tentacle:
Google Flu Trends, Mexico Edition
Google, in a speedy effort to point their query crystal ball toward swine flu, just launched Google Flu trends for Mexico. The site, just like Flu Trends for the US, looks at aggregate user search queries that might indicate a higher prevalence of flu in a region. Though they don’t publish the specific methods involved, if, say, millions of users in a region started searching for something like “achy muscles and fever” or “I think I’ve got the flu,” the software might notice the trend and note it on the website. Though it’s certainly not perfect, the primary benefit to this approach is that it has the potential to pick up on flu outbreaks a bit quicker than other epidemiological data because it’s real time and avoids the lag of a patient getting to a hospital, then the data getting to an agency like the CDC, etc. Google is calling the site “experimental” for now because they’ve not yet had the chance to validate their models against good clinical data, but decided that they wanted to get it launched as quickly as possible.
Let’s just hope that the swine flu is not transmissible to computers; even my ThinkPad was in a panic today.
FDA Scrutinizing “New” Medical Devices
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Food and Drug Administration is requiring Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, Inc., Royal Philips Electronics, and a various other medical device manufacturers to further explain and justify their products’ safety and efficacy.
This is a part of the Safe Medicals Act of 1990, passed by Congress, that tightens control and testing of Class 3 devices. There is some concern that these new actions by the FDA will lead to further increases the cost of development of new medical equipment and lengthen the time to clinical use in patients.
