You've got ProMED-mail; system spreads outbreak news

A worldwide reporting plan takes advantage of e-mail and the Internet to speed information to doctors.

By Susan J. Landers, AMNews staff. May 16, 2005.

Washington -- A subscription to ProMED-mail, short for the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases, provides a virtual front seat to a world of infections.

The service is probably not for the fainthearted. A recent sampling provided updates on the spread of Marburg hemorrhagic fever in Angola, Avian flu's human and animal toll in the Far East, yellow fever in Ecuador, unexplained deaths among pigs in India and charcoal rot in U.S. soybeans.

ProMED-mail is offered free by the International Society for Infectious Diseases, a nonprofit professional organization based in Boston.

Its reports from sources all over the world are screened by a panel of experts, posted on a Web site and sent via e-mail to about 30,000 subscribers.

Lawrence C. Madoff, MD, the editor of ProMED-mail and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, spoke with AMNews.

Question: Is it accurate to call ProMED-mail an early warning system?

Answer: That's what we strive to be. We don't pretend to be the only source of this kind of information but we feel, as do many in the public health field, that multiple sources of information are valuable because they are complementary and serve as validation for one another.

Q: Weren't you out in front in reporting the 2003 SARS outbreak?

A: I think we were pretty much the first to publicly report on it, and we were proud of that. I happened to be the top monitor for the week the SARS report was received. I had no idea what it was we were seeing, but I had a sense that something important was going on.