The Web has become a major source of information about the H1N1 flu virus (more commonly known as swine flu), but the medium is proving to be a double-edged sword.
Hucksters are sending spam and putting up their own Web sites to offer flu treatments. Some bloggers who are tracking H1N1 are speculating that this flu could have been constructed by terrorists as a weapon.
Meanwhile, government agencies are bolstering their Web sites and utilizing new media to counteract the bad information they see spreading online.
"We want to try to not only get out there but tell people we're coming and try to deter (bogus Web sites) as much as possible," said Richard Cleland, an assistant director at the Federal Trade Commission, which, along with the Food and Drug Administration, has asked the public for help in ferreting out bogus flu treatments.
H1N1 is the first flu outbreak in which the Web has played a major role. The vast amount of information about the virus online illustrates how opportunistic the Web is and how hard it can be to distinguish good information from bad.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta is using Twitter, podcasts, videos and other social tools to broadcast alerts in English and Spanish. The CDC also has a team of people who do nothing but scan the Web to find bad information -- such as the rumor that pork was unsafe -- so the CDC can counteract it. Spokeswoman Shelly Diaz said the CDC learned a lot about social media during the salmonella outbreaks last winter.
Volunteers are stepping in to help government agencies broadcast good information about the flu. Google is tracking flu trends in Mexico at google.org/flutrends, even though the data are not verified because of a lack of historical data, a spokeswoman said.
At isc.sans.org, security researchers from the Internet Storm Center have published a list of Web sites that may be trying to take advantage of the public, and F-Secure, an antivirus vendor, has published a similar list on its blog. Security vendors are tracking swine flu-related spam.
(E-mail Deborah Gage at dgage(at)sfchronicle.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit the San Francisco Chronicle
Post new comment