The flu flourishes online

Experts say the worst of this year's influenza outbreak is over, yet information about the virus is still peaking on the Web. Everything about influenza is flourishing online-from diagnosing your own symptoms to news updates to continuing medical education credits.

One good starting place is Yahoo! News-Flu Season http://fullcoverage.yahoo.com/fc/Health/Flu_Season/. The Yahoo! folks have highlighted some interesting and informative sites, from news stories and magazine articles to audio and video files. Magazine and journal articles often give solid overviews and current trends on a topic. In addition to the articles on Yahoo!, Scientific American has a feature article, "Disarming Flu Viruses" http://www.sciam.com/1999/0199issue/0199laver.html, which delves into the past, present and future of the influenza bug, complete with text links to related sites and illustrations.

The PBS television series "The American Experience" explores the deadly flu epidemic of 1918-19 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/influenza/. The Web site provides an overview of the program, with a map showing the growth of the outbreak, city snapshots and a teacher's guide. A bibliography of the same outbreak has been compiled by UB librarians on the Health Sciences Library's History of Medicine Web site at http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/hsl/history/flu.html.

Government agencies compiling information and statistics on the flu include the National Library of Medicine's Medline Plus Health Information page http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/influenza.html. Here you will find links to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the primary National Institutes of Health (NIH) institute for research on influenza, as well as links to clinical trials, statistics and prevention/screening.

Researchers will be interested in the Influenza Sequence Database from Los Alamos National Laboratory http://www.flu.lanl.gov/. Physicians and other health-care professionals can avail themselves of continuing-medical-education credit on influenza from the University of Florida Shands Hospitals and the College of Medicine course "Influenza: A to B" http://www.medinfo.ufl.edu/cme/flu/flu.html. Modules are for one CME Category 1 credit and are either free or require a nominal fee.

Locally, the Buffalo Museum of Science is hosting an exhibit on "Microbes: Invisible InvadersŠAmazing Allies" now through April 23 http://www.sciencebuff.org/Happening_Now/#content.2.

How do you know if you have the flu? Many health sites are available to help diagnose the virus. Both the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases pages on influenza http://www.nfid.org/library/influenza/diagnosis/index.html and Better Homes and Gardens Family Health Guide to Colds, Flu and Allergies http://www.bhglive.com/health/coldflu.html give insights into symptoms, treatments and vaccines. Tracking the flu in your area can be done through the "Weather Channel's" weather.com site http://www.weather.com/health/flu/. You can approach the flu from any angle and find substantial information on the Web. Just apply the Purell liberally before surfing!

For assistance connecting to the World Wide Web via UB computer accounts, contact the Computing Center Help Desk at 645-3542.

-Sue Neumeister and Lori Widzinski, University Libraries