Health Literacy,  News

Swine Flu Spreads Panic Over the Internet

The recent spreading of the deadly Swine Flu has started a wave of panic in the media. The Internet isn’t different in that matter. In fact the Swine Flu is currently the top trending topic on the micro-blogging service Twitter. It is also one of the most searched keyword on search engines such as Google and Yahoo. For example “Swine Flu Ohio” is the 27th most popular search keyword on Google. As for the blogosphere, the keyword “Swine Flu” has been indexed on almost 2800 blogs all over the Internet, as of April 26. This is expected to continue to increase as more people get infected.

The flu, which originated in Mexico, has already spread to 5 states in the US (New York, Ohio, Kansas, Texas and California) and two Canadian provinces (British Columbia and New Brunswick). It is also suspected to have spread to other countries such as France. 80 people have died from it in Mexico alone, and 20 are confirmed to be infected in the United States.

The following map by Google shows the location of confirmed Swine Flu infections:

Swine Flu Google MapSwine Flu Google Map

All this looks much more serious than the bird flu (2003-present), but it is not yet a pandemic so lets breathe! We might want to take some precautions though, such as washing our hands frequently or avoiding contact with people showing any symptoms of a cold or flu.

Read more: Swine Flu Spreads Panic Over The Web

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Paul Tomaszewski is a science & tech writer as well as a programmer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of CosmoBC. He has a degree in computer science from John Abbott College, a bachelor's degree in technology from the Memorial University of Newfoundland, and completed some business and economics classes at Concordia University in Montreal. While in college he was the vice-president of the Astronomy Club. In his spare time he is an amateur astronomer and enjoys reading or watching science-fiction. You can follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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