Posted on 05/01/2009 9:17:34 PM PDT by tarpit
Having been following the Swine Flu / H1N1 outbreak for some time, I thought it would be interesting to put together a reference to the various State home pages, as well as references to their Department of Health. It was an elightening experience. Had this been a biological warfare, there are some things that the States could do to make it easier to share information.
First, finding the various State home pages was not necessarily straight forward. Using Google, for example, State Universities trumped State Government web pages in the links ranking and it took some digging to find the actual State government home page.
Second, finding the Department of Health, or equivalent therein for a given State was not straight forward. In many cases, searching from the State home page for "Health Department" did not provide a top ranked response. Instead, I often had to search for "swine flu" or "h1n1" and look at the link references to determine what the home page was for the Department of Health in that State.
Third, but probably most important, the White House causing the switch of name from "Swine Flu" to "H1N1" could potentially have had devastating effects. In some states, such as Texas and California, there were numerous state published documents that were already indexed with Swine Flu. Searching for Swine Flu within the state search engine would return results with that phrase only. When the state started to switch to the H1N1 reference, then newer more timely documents would not be available to the public who used the prior "Swine Flu" reference. Thus I could easily search for Swine Flu and find references to older documents instead of finding references to newer documents with more timely information. Another flaw in this recasting of terms, is that some states, such as NJ, use H1N1 while other states such as Texas use the Swine Flu reference. This means that Google and hundreds of other Search Sites that spider the State web site will also add to confusion in their search results.
Fourth, some states offer a Search services, but do not offer ranking of results sorted by Date. This is really important to be able to obtain timely information in the immediate search response instead of having to sift through hundreds of references to older documents that the search engine thinks are more relevant.
Fifth, some states have information about the Swine Flu / H1N1 on their State Home Page, while others provide more detailed information on the Department of Health page within the state. However, it is hit or miss. It seems like a political football between the Governor of that State and the head of their Health Department. For example, why would NJ feel it most important to reference that "Corzine announced..." instead of it coming from the Health Department.
Point of clarification. The reference to Corzine had to do with the initial report of Swine Flu within the State. Other States, such as New Hampshire, did similar types of announcements. In fact, New Hampshire’s Department of Health is under their Department of Safety, but that page has no mention of Swine Flu (H1N1). Instead, it is listed off of the main State Web Page. Again, the lack of continuity adds to confusion.
I have been using Yahoo News search for each state. For example, here is what the link would look like for Wyoming+swine+flu
http://news.search.yahoo.com/search/news?p=wyoming+swine+flu&ei=UTF-8
This returns news stories that contain the three words with the most recent first. Just change “Wyoming” to any other state in the link and you are good to go.
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