FluPortal.org

The FluPortal team has been trading tips and ideas with the good folks over at PBS Engage about covering H1N1 using social media and online tools. One particular suggestion caught my eye: to create and post local maps showing the nearest available H1N1 vaccination clinics.

Creating a custom map is pretty easy these days with very little technical know-how needed. The first step, however, is to find the locations you’ll be mapping. Contact your local or state health department directly, or use Flu.gov’s flu shot locator to find information for your community.

Once you have the locations, you can use Google Maps to create a custom map and place markers indicating the locations of vaccination clinics in your area. Before building a map, it’s a good idea to open a Google account under your station’s call letters (or whatever name your audience identifies with your organization). A map created by “WXYZ” will be considered more trustworthy than one made by “Bob.”

When you’re in Google Maps with your new station account, just click on “My Maps” to the left of the main map window and you’ll be off and running. And when finished, you’re able embed the map onto your station’s website. Once it’s up, be sure to promote the map on your broadcast signal.

Read Google’s guide using to My Maps.

Google Maps also provides an API that organizations can use to create more complex maps or automatically generate maps from geo-data and other sources. If you’re interested, here’s where to find information on the Google Maps API.

Below is a map I put together this afternoon using Google My Maps. I have mapped the locations for H1N1 vaccination clinics administered by the Chicago Department of Public Health. It took me about 30 minutes start to finish to build the map, add information for each marker, and post it here on the blog. If you have questions about making a map like this, contact us and the FluPortal team will be happy to help get you started. And if you’re a mapping all-star and have additional tips, leave them in the comments of this post.

Chicago Department of Public Health H1N1 Vaccination Locations, Open 3p-8p T, Th & 9a-2p Sa

View Chicago H1N1 Vaccine Locations in a larger map

If you’re looking for H1N1 PSA videos to embed on your station’s swine-flu page (or in a story), check out the full selection available on flu.gov. You’ll find the swine-flu rap that won HHS’s PSA video contest, PBS’s Sid the Science Kid video, Sesame Street’s Elmo videos (some also in Spanish), and messages from some celebrities and members of Congress.

You might also be interested in these more unusual alternatives. I found them using keyword searches on YouTube and Vimeo — a process very similar to looking for H1N1 photos on Flickr. (Like Flickr, both YouTube and Vimeo have a wealth of terrible or plagiarized H1N1 offerings, but if you sort carefully, you can find gems.)

Kevin Krasko from Cranston, RI, explains that he made his H1N1 PSA with his friend Ethan “for a video contest at the University of Rhode Island.” It’s very clever. (Kevin neglects to mention that he and Ethan won first prize in the contest.)

[Kevin Krasko / Vimeo]

If you’re looking for another college-made PSA, Rutgers University’s Wake Up Rutgers TV show put out its own prevention message last month.

Finally: a look back to the swine-flu scare of 1976. The two entertaining PSAs in this video appear to have been produced by the U.S. Public Health Service, but we weren’t able to confirm their authenticity (more on this below).

Jeff Krulik, who posted these videos on YouTube, claims they are “from the voluminous shelves of the National Archives.” We contacted NARA ourselves to double check, but the friendly staff said it doesn’t have the resources to watch the video and match it to what they have. If you’d like to do your own research, you can type “swine flu” into this NARA search box — or you could contact the motion picture division for the full catalog.

[Richard Sunderland / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

Here are two new resources that might be helpful in your reporting or as tips for your audience.

First: the FDA has a list of all of the ingredients in the various H1N1 vaccines. It makes it easy to figure out which doses contain thimerosal, a preservative that worries some parents who are deciding whether or not to vaccinate their kids. (For FDA information on thimerosal in vaccines generally, click here.)

Second: Flu.gov just updated its Q&A on treating children with Tamiflu. It focuses on how to administer the drug.

[Ken Mills]

Colleagues: just a quick note to let you know that I am handling station relations for FluPortal.org. FluPortal is a service of PRX in conjunction with NPR and supported by CPB. The goal is to provide stations and other public media outlets access to tools and resources for coverage of H1N1.

My job is to make certain that public media broadcasters, journalists, producers and content managers are aware of the resources and tools available to them. Please let me know about your station’s H1N1 coverage and links, ideas and tools that we can share with other stations.

Please take a look at FluPortal.org — the site is continuously evolving and we need your feedback on which sections are most useful and anything we can do to make online tools easier to implement.

Also, check out our private Google Group, where you can discuss H1N1 coverage with us and with stations, journalists and public health professionals.

I can be reached at 763-513-9988 and via the FluPortal contact form.

Ken operates the Ken Mills Agency (KMA) based in Minneapolis. He consults program producers and stations. Before starting KMA in September 1997, Ken was Director of News at Public Radio International (PRI) and managed NPR member stations in Los Angeles, California, and Fort Collins, Colorado.

WFCR’s Focus Western New England will be airing an hour-long H1N1 call-in special tomorrow at 4:00 pm ET. Producer Jill Kaufman spoke with me about the challenges of putting together a regional swine-flu program.

WFCR, Kaufman pointed out, is in the somewhat unusual position of serving an area (western New England) made up of several states: parts of MA, CT, VT, NH, and even NY. She explained that for a story like H1N1, this complicates things. Why? Because each state has a distinct local public-health infrastructure.

She gave me a specific example. Massachusetts, she said, “has roughly 350 municipalities, and almost each one has its own little public-health department. These departments deal with the state, and the state deals with CDC.” In Connecticut, in contrast, “the smaller towns are in health districts, so in dealing with the state, they’re doing it as a coalition.”

That variation means that many aspects of the story — like the distribution of vaccine — may unfold very differently in communities that are physically close together. It also means that WFCR reporters and producers count extra legwork to stay on top of swine-flu developments in five separate states. Kaufman did note, though, that because state and local public-health officials get their “marching orders from DC,” there are lots of similarities, too.

Kaufman says the show will explore some aspects of the state differences — like whether it even makes sense to draw state and town boundaries for a pandemic disease — but will focus more broadly on ethical questions: Are public-health campaigns stirring up too much or not enough fear? Does the federal government effectively have new controls over state policy because of the national emergency? How should schools and religious institutions and employers handle the outbreak?

This morning, Kaufman found out that her main studio guest, a public-health nurse, cannot be on the show tomorrow — because her three kids all came down with flu. The medical director at the nurse’s health center (currently healthy) is going to fill in for her. Kaufman suggested, half-kidding, that pubmedia stations consider asking guests — and producers! — to stay home and hook in by phone during a pandemic.

You’ll be able to listen to WFCR’s swine-flu special here, live. It will be hosted by Tina Antolini. Fred Bever is the executive producer. The audio will be archived here after the show.

In Miami
[Adrian Salgado / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

The H1N1 news this week continues to center on the vaccine: on the short supply, on those clamoring for it, and on those who doubt its safety. To find information we’ve compiled on the vaccine, click here.

Two resources in particular seem worth highlighting. The first is CDC updates on the vaccine supply. This page will keep you updated on how many doses have been ordered, shipped, and allocated — and where the doses are going.

The second is the CDC’s H1N1 vaccine-safety page. It encapsulates the government’s response to the doubts and anxiety many Americans are expressing about the shot.

Despite the H1N1 vaccine shortage, people have been waiting for hours in long lines to try to tap the existing supply.

Here, from Flickr, are three photos — freely usable on your site — that tell the story of a vaccine line in Missoula, MT. (For tips on finding free creative-commons H1N1 photos for your website, check out this post.)

Lance Fisher lives in Missoula, where he’s a coder, husband, and father to son Colin. On Friday, his family waited for four hours in line for a FluMist vaccine for Colin — so long that at one point Lance had to go track down some takeout food.

First they waited in the parking garage of the clinic (only half the line visible):

[lancefisher / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

Then they waited inside the clinic:

[lancefisher / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

Finally, Colin got the vaccine:

[lancefisher / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

Similar lines have been snaking across the country. To see a queue at a Kaiser hospital in Hayward, CA, look here and here. (These photos also have a creative-commons license.) Expect more vaccine-line shots to pop up on Flickr over the next few days.

[nate steiner / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

To continue on the theme of CDC news: are its online H1N1 updates and its flu Tweets insufficient to keep you in the loop? Then you have two other mobile options from CDC: a simplified H1N1 site designed for cell phones and, if your phone doesn’t connect to the web, text-message health tips. The text messages are part of a three-month pilot project launched in September. If you sign up for them, you’ll receive about three texts a week (many but not all about H1N1).

Complication: pneumonia
[scottfeldstein / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

As the H1N1 vaccine shortage escalates, the CDC continues a fast and furious schedule of media briefings. The next one is scheduled for tomorrow at 1:00 pm ET. (Sign up here for CDC media alerts.)

These briefings continue to be informative and often range beyond the lead topic of the day. Tuesday’s session, which began with some statistics and the vaccine issue, also contained this interesting note: a best guess at reasons for H1N1 complications in certain people with no underlying conditions.

Betsy McKay [from the Wall Street Journal]: [W]hat makes some healthy people get so severely ill while others get mildly ill? [...]

Anne Schuchat: [S]ome healthy people with this H1N1 virus are having overwhelmingly serious complications. I think there are two factors there. One is that this virus, although it doesn’t do this usually, it can cause a viral pneumonia, an infection in the lower respiratory tract, not just the upper respiratory tract that can be pretty severe with a pretty overwhelming infection that is hard to treat each with antiviral medicines. That’s the exception. Not the rule. We don’t know the factors that leave one person to get that while another person will get a milder infection. A second explanation for healthy people coming down with really overwhelmingly severe disease is bacterial pneumonias. Bacteria can sweep in after influenza has weakened our responses and can cause a very strong infection. We’ve been seeing these bacterial pneumonias caused by staph, some people hear of MRSA, that’s around in our communities and it’s sweeping in sometimes after the influenza, we’ve seeing some infections from pneumococcus. People can get vaccinated against it. There’s a vaccine recommended for people who have chronic diseases like asthma, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, liver disease.

Schuchat goes on to say that future studies will probably give a more complete picture of the causes of complications.

You can watch the CDC briefings here live. Transcripts and audio show up here promptly after the event.

H1N1 travels without a passport
[livatlantis / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

Swine flu is a pandemic, and a pandemic is by definition a border-crossing international problem. If you’re reporting a global dimension of the story, the World Health Organization’s H1N1 page is a good starting point. The BBC’s swine-flu page is another useful English-language resource. It includes the Fergus on Flu blog, in which BBC medical correspondent Fergus Walsh follows the “progress of the virus around the world.” The BBC and Walsh naturally focus on UK developments, which can offer an interesting counterpoint to what’s happening in the U.S. In last Friday’s post, for example, Walsh noted that the UK vaccination program is also gearing up — and also focusing first on at-risk populations.