Paranoid About Swine Flu? There's an App for That

Anyone who isn't at least a little scared about the high probability of a novel flu outbreak this fall either lives in a shack in the woods or hasn't been paying attention. The so-called swine flu (more accurately, H1N1, pictured) reared its ugly head last spring, but could return as a full-blown menace any time now.

And if you happen to have an iPhone, perhaps you might want to download Outbreaks Near Me. The dead-serious app with the schmaltzy name (which is free) essentially mobilizes HealthMap, a global disease alert map funded in part by Google's nonprofit foundation. Like HealthMap, users of the new app (maintained by the same database) can log in and see where the nearest pandemic is. How fun!

Unlike HealthMap, though, Outbreaks Near Me users also can report possible outbreaks by sending alerts to the database. Wired.com published an article about the apocalyptic new application, which is referred to by its creators as "participatory epidemiology."

HealthMap founder Clark Freifeld explains how it works, as quoted by Wired: "Say you're in a clinical setting as a patient or clinician and seeing lots of unusual cases of something. You'd be able to note that down and submit it into the system."

Okay. But say you're a devious high school kid who doesn't feel like going to school and you have an iPhone -- what's to stop you from convincing all of your iPhone-toting friends to download the free app and report about widespread flu-like symptoms in and around the school grounds? Yeah, maybe it wouldn't work, but I guarantee it will be attempted.

The new app sounds promising, in all honesty, but let's hope we don't experience an outbreak serious enough to generate the critical mass required to make such reporting useful.

Photo courtesy of C.S. Goldsmith and A. Balish, CDC, via Wikimedia Commons