Swine flu versus TB

His english is a little broken, but Hans Rosling has a great break-down of the coverage of Swine flu versus the coverage of TB and their relative death rates. It's interesting on two levels that pertain to Social Networking. First, it discusses the spread of disease which is obviously a social networking issue. TB is a curable condition, but the treatments are obviously not nearly as available as they need to be, as you can see form the visualizations. The second is the breakdown of the "media hype," which is very interesting. While TB gets almost no coverage, it kills many, many times more people a day yet Swine Flu has been getting crazy amounts of coverage. This shows how susceptible networks are to "hype" distributed by central organizations - media outlets in this case.




http://infosthetics.com/archives/2009/05/hans_rosling_video_gapcast_swine_flu_news_versus_death_ratio.html

In the last week there have have been e-mial notices going around Health Services about both a confirmed case of swine flu at NU and TB testing do to possible contact with an infected student.

I just spoke with a girl whose Mom does swine flue testing at a local hospital. I hear (second hand, admittedly, but it's from a concerned friend so it seems more pertinent) they've been running about 200-250 tests for swine flu everyday and confirming about 6 each day.

She said "It's here; like, once it gets into an area, it spreads. The media is making a big deal about it but really, it's going around." She didn't know the terms, but she was describing how weak ties get a virus into a community, and then strong ties quickly allow the virus to flood that community.