H1N1 Comic: Keeping Children & Teens Home With Flu

I have been a fan of my (King County) Public Health department for a while, but particularly enjoy their public education resources for H1N1 which are always in plain English, often multilingual, and usually include helpful illustration for those with low literacy. Even if you're a medical librarian, don't your eyes glaze over when reading yet another symptoms checklist full of bullet points? Mine do.

Their latest offering, Home With Flu, is a 2-page PDF comic aimed towards parents who are now facing a new school year with the likelihood that flu will be a part of it. It provides practical and helpful advice on planning for backup childcare in a responsible way, when exactly to keep kids home, and calling the doctor. Here's one of the panels:



I hope to see this translated in multiple languages soon although it is (mostly) helpful as is due to the graphic design.

Friday Foolery #33: Kiki wishes all safe travels to MLA '09

Kiki (short for Waikiki) is one of my childhood dolls. My grandma loved to travel and always brought me a 'native' doll from wherever she went. I kept every single one and they are on three shelves of a display case in our living room. I don't remember her giving Kiki to me so since she is soft with no pointy edges or detachable parts & named for where she's from (like Jamaica, another cloth doll) I'm going to guess I was about 3 years old.

Anyone recognize the MLA hand sanitizer? Who knew the swag bag goodies from the New Member's Breakfast at MLA '08 in Chicago could turn out to be so prophetic! The ring is from the Sisterhood of the Flowery Cupcake Rings. You had to be there to understand that one, and they claim they'll bring their rings to MLA '09 so if you spot one say hi! All of them will affirm I'm even more of a lunatic in person than I am online. I was the one who brought the cupcakes, after all.

I won't be going to MLA '09 this year by choice as I am actively researching and preparing for my time on the other side of the country at the bioinformatics fellowship in Woods Hole later this month. I also want to enjoy my husband's birthday, my birthday, and our son launching a rocket (not NIH-strength) as part of his very first Scouting graduation ceremony here at home.

I may be obsessed with health informatics (and bacon), but family is always my life.

Medlib's Round delay & near-pandemic social media progress

Due to a combination of people preparing for the Medical Library Association's upcoming conference in Hawaii and the global outbreak of H1N1 influenza, the Medlib's Round blog carnival is delayed until June 6th with publication on June 9th.

Many are, as usual, wondering if "the media" has overblown the H1N1 outbreak. I haven't watched any television news or talk shows recently (I rarely to never do anyway) so I can't comment there. However, when it comes to online and social media outlets, two things in particular impress me for signs of how the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are opening up to these tools as high quality information resources during a near-pandemic situation.

The first is MedlinePlus and PubMed with the placement of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) H1N1 widget on the front pages. In addition, the very first hyperlink offered for the H1N1 Flu (Swine Flu) MedlinePlus page is @CDCemergency, an official Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) Twitter account. When I began writing this post the morning of May 6th, it had 104,266 followers. As of 10:25 that same evening the number had jumped up to 108,698! Others without Twitter accounts may be subscribing via RSS feed, those numbers are not included.

The second is the inclusion of Patricia Anderson's iGoogle H1N1 swine flu tab as an information resource within the NIH Library. To be clear, this is not NLM as NLM is the medical library for everyone and the NIH Library is for the 27 entities that make up the National Institutes of Health.

Are these uses of online & social media and the resources wiki I started all hype? Of course not. As is always the case for work and our own personal sanity, we must enable our own filters to narrow in on quality resources, share them, and tune out misinformation. A bit of humor now and then for you is good for you too.

This is a good opportunity to review your own emergency preparedness plans too... H1N1 isn't too severe now, but nobody can say that will continue to be the case during the flu season this fall. Will your library be prepared to still function if social distancing measures are enacted? Check out a pandemic planning exercise for more details.

I'm still hopeful for the day when we will see an NLM social media presence. CDC are truly the 2009 HHS social media pioneers who have had their hands full between the peanut recall and now H1N1. Hopefully things will settle down to allow for evaluation to determine some best practices to be shared by all, but in the meantime keep up the amazing work!

91 years: Reflections on Influenza & Information

Seattle Times, Dan Eskenazi

These post-Edwardian ladies (look carefully, also the two cats!) are wearing face masks by order of the Seattle mayor when the Spanish flu hit here in October 1918.

Our 6-year-old son came home from school today and informed me that his first grade classmate (the same one he got in trouble for kissing earlier this year) told him there's a very sad problem where people in Mexico have swine flu and some of them have even died. He confirmed that his teacher hasn't talked about the flu with the class and we've been trying to keep the panicky news headlines away from him.

I thought of the masked ladies (and cats) and wondered what my great-grandparents told my grandparents during the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918 since they were about the same age as our son is now. No family stories of that time have been passed down through the years.

What, then, can I tell him about now when we're one level away from a pandemic according to the World Health Organization? The same thing I always have since he was old enough to walk and talk: Wash your hands and keep them out of your eyes, nose & mouth!

That, and Mama's trying to help share accurate health information on a wiki, tweeting about it, and some people in Germany quickly noticed. Major kudos to EBSCO for DynaMed free swine flu resources.

Can you imagine what impact instant global health news and information sharing might have had in 1918?

What lies ahead for even better information sharing in the future that will make our current technology tools laughingly obsolete?

Edit: Within an hour after writing & posting this, the announcement that probable H1N1 is in Seattle was made!