technology | nosleepingdogs

ProMED Mail is one of the most important information resources on the net, and most of us have never heard of it. It’s an email list which describes itself as a “global electronic reporting system for outbreaks of infectious diseases and acute exposures to toxins that affect human health, including those in animals and in plants grown for food or animal feed”.

Unlike the official clearinghouses run by WHO and CDC, ProMED is, in its own words, “open to all sources” and its reports are freely available to us all. ProMED was first to raise concern about the aggressive respiratory disease spreading in China in 2003, which became known as SARS. Before the Chinese authorities had permitted their officials to report the disease to WHO, Catherine Strommen, an elementary school teacher in Fremont, California, spotted a post in an international teachers’ chat room from a concerned teacher in China describing “an illness that started like a cold, but killed its victims in days”.

Alarmed, Strommen emailed an old neighbor and friend, Stephen Cunnion, M.D., a retired Navy physician and epidemiologist who now lived in Maryland. A practical, no-nonsense man, Cunnion started searching the web. With no success, he tried a new tack—sending an email to ProMED-mail, a global electronic reporting system for outbreaks of emerging infections and toxins. After quoting Strommen’s missive, he asked: “Does anyone know anything about this problem?”

The tiny ProMED staff conducted its own web search. It, too, came up empty-handed. On February 10, it sent out to tens of thousands of subscribers a posting headed: “PNEUMONIA – CHINA (GUANGDONG): RFI,” or Request for Information.

Thus did the world first learn of SARS, the new and deadly infection that would kill 774 people and infect 8,000 in 27 countries.

From an article by Madeline Drexler in The Journal of Life Sciences.

H1N1 Reports (Swine-avian-human Influenza A)

To keep up on H1N1 flu [I agree with the pig farmers, “swine flu” sounds like your big risk is getting it from pigs and pork, not human sneezes and handshakes] check the ProMED main page. While all the media is now frothing over with “news” about this disease, some of it sounds as reliable as alien abduction accounts. ProMED is timely and scientifically accurate but understandable by non-biologists. It includes valuable, and interesting, commentary on reports and questions: “this has been reported, but here’s what we don’t know, or here are local factors that must be considered in evaluating it”.

What ProMED does

ProMED is a program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases which began in 1994. It does not simply print whatever comes in—this is an extremely well-moderated list. A group of specialists checks and filters the reports, seeks more information from local sources and other experts, and provides judicious commentary. This group also “scans newspapers, the internet, health department and government alerts, and other information sources for inklings that an infectious disease, perhaps not yet reported widely, is threatening animal, plant and/or human health.”

I think I first signed up to receive the digests back when “mad cow disease” was emerging, and have since used ProMED to follow diseases such as anthrax and Ebola.
A topic of interest to me recently concerns outbreaks of measles and mumps in Western nations due to falling rates of vaccination. And as a former zookeeper I keep up on diseases of wildlife and zoo animals, including the fungal disease threatening whole populations of wild bats in the Eastern US. ProMED also covers plant diseases (mostly of crops).

All of this, infectious diseases of humans, wildlife, and crops, is of greatly increased urgency because climate change, global transport, and destruction of wild areas all lead to the spread of familiar diseases to new locales and the emergence of “new” diseases previously only found in remote wild areas. With regard to contaminants and toxins, governments are unable to deal with this effectively due to the political power of corporations and lack f oversight in producing countries. ProMED can’t make your food and furniture non-toxic, but it can sound alarms that might otherwise be silenced.References to a topic’s prior appearances on the list are attached to current reports, and archives are easy to access. Editions in French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish are now available.

“Each posting is limited to 25 KB bandwidth—to ensure that it slips through an old-fashioned dial-up modem in the most remote areas of the world (where new infectious threats tend to smolder). ‘We use technology that was state-of-the-art in 1994. We use email—plain-text email at that. We don’t use fancy fonts,’ Madoff says. ‘The power of the Internet is its ubiquity and speed; it’s not necessarily in all the neat things you can do.’ [from Drexler’s article cited above]

You can subscribe here.

Toxins and contaminants

ProMED also collects, evaluates, and disseminates reports of health problems related to toxins and contamination of food and medicines. These can be quite unusual. For example, the case of the toxic leather sofas in Britain:

Photo: Effect on leg of reaction to toxic chemical contained in sofas. From BBC.

A judge [in the UK] is expected to order several retailers to pay millions of
pounds to people who suffered burns and rashes from faulty leather
sofas….

More than 1600 people claim to have been affected by the problem. Tens
of thousands more people could have burns not yet traced to sofas.
The High Street stores, along with 11 others, may have to pay more
than 10 million pounds [USD 14.3 million] in compensation and legal
costs, the shoppers’ lawyers say. They claim that makes it “the
largest group compensation claim ever seen in British Courts.”

The sofas, which were manufactured in China, were packed with sachets
of an anti-mould chemical called dimethyl fumarate to stop them from
going moldy during storage in humid conditions.

Commonly known as DMF, the toxic, fine white powder has been used by
some manufacturers to protect leather goods like furniture and shoes
from mold. Even very small amounts can be harmful.

One sofa customer, who is well aware of the health problems caused by
her purchase, is a customer who bought a leather sofa suite from
Argos in April 2007. Almost a year later, she started to notice a
rash developing on her arms and legs. After a few weeks, her skin
started flaking off. She says the irritation was so bad, she was off
work for 2 months. This customer was seen by more than a dozen
doctors, who couldn’t work out what was causing the rash.

She said: “It was very, very painful; I couldn’t sleep at night; I
couldn’t walk about; I couldn’t drive; every time I did walk about,
the skin would fall off, and I would leave a trail of it, therefore,
I couldn’t go to work.”

Reliable histories of outbreaks/events

ProMED doesn’t just present breaking news and requests for additional reports; it frequently publishes very useful summaries of what’s been learned, and what action governmental agencies have taken. For example, “Melamine contaminated food products – Worldwide ex China” and “Prion disease Update 2009 (01)” (Mad Cow Disease and its human infectious disease, the fatal “variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease”.

Supporting ProMED

Believe it or not, ProMED is supported by individuals, with not a penny of funding from any government. That means they are independent (remember the movie Jaws, where the city council wants to suppress news of the shark attacks?) and fast to react. They sift a lot of news from all sorts of sources, put out calls for more information, and disseminate news in a responsible way.

If the work of this group seems like something you’d like to support, here’s your chance. They’re having a brief Spring fundraising campaign. To quote their email,

Your gift funds quick information every day – The economical, low-tech computer programs we use enable us to speed ProMED to your mailboxes, to post it online where anyone can find it, , and to provide the administrative services (accounting, office space, cell phone connections, etc.) required to support a small, agile worldwide enterprise.

ProMED-mail reaches over 50,000 public health officials, students, journalists, agricultural specialists, infectious disease professionals and others around the globe. Because it is free, subscribers in more than 187 countries have an equal opportunity to know when a disease outbreak occurs — and can spring into action when necessary to prevent or minimize its spread.

If the Spring campaign is past, here’s the main donations page.

Over three decades our household has averaged a new coffee-maker every three or four years. We’ve had Braun, Gevalia, Black and Decker, Krups, and other brands I’ve forgotten. A couple of times we got the $90 model but mostly they’ve been about half that price. Either way, eventually they quit working and this big non-repairable piece of plastic and electronics goes into the garbage.

As years have passed they’ve gotten more complicated, and that seemed to be the downfall of last week’s purchase. It was a Krups with an added water filter (good for us, with mineral-rich well water, but also one more thing to have to find, buy, and replace––profit’s big on consumables, like printer cartridges!). It also had an extra idiot light feature: a “low water” display and override which would keep it from running if it thought there was not enough water. This was not a feature we wanted, in fact we did not discover it until it malfunctioned on the third day of use. Push ON and all that happened was a cryptic pattern flashing on the display.

In the morning, when you want your coffee, reading a coffee-maker manual is not on your list of desired activities. Before consulting the manual we tried the chimpanzee approach, pushing the four control buttons in various combinations. Luckily we did not happen to activate any of the more arcane features, which can only be guessed at, nor (since we live in such a remote location) did the machine’s electronic calls for help manage to bring its plastic comrades jetting to its aid in time to defend it from our mishandling. Nor did we fix it, even after we deciphered the display message. We plugged and unplugged it, emptied and refilled it, all to no avail. Then we called the Customer Service number and listened to music for 20 minutes before a polite woman with a southern accent came on, heard our story, and informed us that by unplugging it and plugging it back in, we had “done all the troubleshooting” that we could do and our next step was to pack it up and ship it to their service center. Or, she said, we “might be able” to return it to the point of sale for a “straight-across trade”. Yes, I said, thinking “But not for another one of your brand!”

By then, we had made our morning’s coffee using a kettle and a flat-bottomed gold filter set in a sieve over a large pyrex measuring container. It was good. Caffeinated, we discussed our next step. Something simpler, not plastic and electronic, would be good; perhaps it would even have been Made NOT in China. We decided on a percolator, since Dan said he’d seen one on the shelf when he chose the Krups, and I remarked that when I was a kid people had the same percolator for 20 years, perking on and on. We marvelled that the coffee-makers of our childhood were still being sold. Maybe we weren’t the only people tired of having to read a manual for something that should be simple, and tired of the (planned or unplanned) short life-span of the new coffee-makers.

For $45 we got a shiny stainless steel West Bend percolator. It has no controls. Fill with water (there is a clear water gauge on the side, one new feature); insert the tube up which the hot water flows; put coffee in metal basket, put on lid, place basket on tube, put coffee-maker lid on, plug in. Less than a minute later hot water is flowing up into the clear knob on top and down onto the coffee basket. There is no possible programming, no clock, and only one “feature”, a plastic light on the base. I thought the thing was already broken, when the light did not come on after the percolator was plugged in. But no: the light comes on when the coffee is done. It keeps the coffee hot until unplugged, so you have to remember to do that to avoid cooked-all-day coffee remains. Unlike all the coffee-machine carafes we have ever had, the percolator does not drip when you pour too fast. Also, it takes up less space on the counter.

And the coffee? We like it better than what we were drinking before. The perking noise is pleasant, unlike the hissing and puffing of the previous type. Only one part didn’t turn out as we hoped: it was “Made in China”. But we hope it’s the last coffee-maker we buy for a long long time.