Jessica Elgot

Scientists discover the root of the problem...

How useful is the internet in a global pandemic? 

Very useful actually, particularly for typing ‘difference between pandemic and epidemic’ into google. The internet can tell me swiftly that actually pandemic just means a bit bigger than an epidemic. Epidemic is lots of people have swine flu. Pandemic is most people have swine flu.

Now, call me a pedant, but I would guess, by and large, that most people don’t have swine flu. So far perhaps 200 cases have been confirmed. And maybe 500 suspected. So say, at a push, 1000 have swine flu. That’s not most people.

But the net is infected with swine flu. The pigs have infected twitter, comment is free, the blogosphere, facebook and lots of have-a-go-hero sites which list multiple confusing symptoms for swine flu.

A huge number of people now have the ability to worry if they have the sniffles. Should we be worried about the swathes of inaccurate reports and blogs on the disease which might cause a global pandemic of ‘fear of swine flu’?

I think it’s fair to say most people have got that, when USA TODAY reports…

• Search-engine giants Yahoo and Google saw spikes in searches of phrases such as “swine flu symptoms” or “swine flu pandemic” early this week: “Swine flu” rose to the top of Yahoo’s searches this week.
• Similar terms on Google increased by more than 20-40 times, compared with its monthly average of hits of such key words, a USA TODAY analysis shows.
• On Twitter, swine-flu-related posts crested past 10,000 an hour on Tuesday.

On the bright side, at least the web keeps the hypochondriacs at home, instead of queuing up outside their long-suffering GP’s surgery…