Top Five Health & Disease Monitoring and Warning Sources

Google made big news this week by launching Google Flu Trends – showing considerable Early Warning potential of search terms trends analysis. According to the NY Times, ‘early tests suggest that the service may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.’ This would seem like a good time to share our favorite open sources on the subject of global health and disease outbreaks:

1. CDC – The Center for Disease Control and Prevention publishes multiple feeds and updates.
2. HealthMap – A classic and beautifully-executed mashup of news sources, medical bulletins, and official alerts. Created by by Clark Freifeld and John Brownstein.
3. ProMed-mail – A program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases. Offers multiple email channel subscriptions.
4. MedISys – A real-time news alert system for medical and health-related topics maintained by the Health Threats Unit at Directorate General Health and Consumer Affairs of the European Commission.
5. Global Health Atlas – Maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO) which also publishes a Disease Outbreak News Feed (XML).

Honorable mention goes to Pandemicflu.gov – only excluded from the list above because of its more narrow focus – and HHS.gov by the US Department of Health and Human Services.

Scout Labs: Brand Sentiments and Blogosphere Monitoring Matures

We have been addressing the subject of corporate and brand ’sentiment’ monitoring a few times this year (here, and here). The latest addition to this space may well prove to be most powerful and sophisticated thus far. Scout Labs, currently in private beta, will offer brand ’scouts’ (search agents) that can not only weigh the relevance and frequency of positive vs. negative ’sentiments’ in blogs and news outlets, but do so going back to January 2007. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has taken the site for a spin and reported about it here. How this service could benefit Crisis Management teams and EW efforts remains to be seen as the product reaches commercial availability and speed, cost, and flexibility of ’scouting’ criterion become clear. Certainly one to follow closely as it may become the biggest player in this arena.

Top Five Hurricane Information Sources and Tools

In occasion of the announcement of Dean as the first hurricane of the ‘07 Atlantic Season . . . these are at the top of our list:

1. NOAA-NWS National Hurricane Center
   The mother of all sources – most other services rely on the National Weather Service data to start with. RSS updates include ‘basin-wide’ feeds: here’s the Atlantic.
2. NOAA Weather Radio All Hazard
   When all else fails (and you better believe it will, if you are among those really needing the news) this radio signal will carry on the news.
3. IBISEYE
   Possibly the most effective mesh up of weather data and Google Maps.
   
4. The Miami Herald Hurricane page – for which much credit must be give to the excellent Tropical Weather section at Weather Underground (also check out their nifty flash-based storm tracker.)
5. Google Earth addicts will find the best collection of live weather and storm tracking info in this KMZ collection we covered back in March. (Thanks to GEBlog.com) Includes hurricanes live positions, global cloud coverage, NOAA severe weather, etc.

Corporate Dirty Laundry: Where is it Hanging?

Back in February we mentioned a few sources of corporate praise and blame. As we often emphasize, anyone involved in enterprise resilience today cannot underestimate the potential impact of rumors and proprietary information flowing through anonymous online forums or blogs. These are our favorite OSInt starting point:

• Anonymous Employer – This appears to be an actual business which claims to make an attempt to contact the company subject of an anonymous report. Although free, their goal is to provide consulting and technology for corporate communication. There is no company directory or name search which means a subscription is required for it to be of any use. On the plus side, it’s a ‘wait and see’ approach for corporate security since any complaint logged to the system would be directly forwarded to the employer.

• BossBitching: As the title suggests, mostly focused on individuals rather than companies as a whole. Most comments we saw bore no direct reference to people or companies and number of posts we found for search and browsing was exceptionally small. Only worth mentioning in light of potential, future expansion – today, it is of little or no value. >>>

Counterfeit Colgate Toothpaste: Crisis Summary & Updates

Updated October 31, 2007

Since May 2007, reports of potentially toxic, Chinese-manufactured toothpaste have been published by media outlets across the Americas. The issue centers on the use of Diethylene Glycol (DEG) found in a number of toothpastes under various brands, including Colgate (for more background see the Useful Links below). Here is a summary of key events as they unfolded – from latest to oldest – which we will continue updating until its relevance is considered active.

July 25: Colgate-Palmolive’s President and CEO, Ian Cook, addresses the (minimal) impact of the counterfeit toothpaste in the Q2 2007 earning call (see transcript here).

July 20: Chinese authorities shut down three chemical manufacturing companies on the basis of safety concerns. Among these is the Taixing Glycerin Factory, which has been accused of exporting diethylene glycol.

July 13: News about counterfeit and toxic toothpaste show no sign of slowdown. Additional reports of products sightings and seizures are reported in Massachusetts, Illinois, and Florida. In Palermo, Italy, one man is hospitalized with an allergic reaction attributed to a counterfeit toothpaste and the number of DEG-contaminated toothpaste brands grows to include (counterfeit) Sensodyne (only reported in the UK thus far).

July 11: “From today onwards, toothpaste manufacturers are not allowed to use diethylene glycol as an ingredient . . .” (Chinese General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine Website). >>>

Money Laundering: Reference Reports Update

Security and Legal departments of financial institutions and multinational organizations may want to take note of a couple of recent publications on the subject of money laundering. The International Monetary Fund just released a detailed assessment of Gibraltar Anti-Money Laundering (AMF) and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) efforts. The report lists not only the core aspects of these activities but some of their shortcomings and various recommendations of good reference value. Also, earlier this month, The U.S. Departments of Treasury, Justice, and Homeland Security issued the 2007 National Money Laundering Strategy, “a report detailing continued efforts to dismantle money laundering and terrorist financing networks and bring these criminals to justice.” Not be forgotten is the regularly-updated Specially Designated Individuals List maintained by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) within the US Treasury.

Atlantic Hurricane Season ‘07: A Dim Outlook

Seven to 10 possible hurricanes on a total of 13 to 17 named storms – this is what NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center has announced today as the forecast for the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season. We have covered a number of of storm-related sources both this week and back in March. Time to put these tools to work and, please, let us know if we missed something of interest.

Applegate: Early Warning & Crisis Management in the Web 2.0 Era

What some in Silicon Valley are now calling ‘Applegate’ – a serious Apple Inc, stock price fluctuation caused by an inaccurate blog announcement – is a perfect sample of crisis management (CM) challenges for public companies in the Web economy. For those who missed it, here is the short version of the May 16 events:

• At 11:49 AM EST, famed tech blog Engadget announces that, according to an internal Apple source, the highly anticipated iPhone and Leopard (Apple’s next OS version) will not meet the target release dates.
• Between 11:56 AM and 12:02 AM, Apple stock faces a brutal selloff, with prices going from $107.89 to $103.42 – equivalent to a 3% or about $4 billion loss in market capitalization.
• Within less than two hours, Apple PR responds stating that the email suggesting the delay was a fake and that products are on schedule. (The full sequence of events and the Engadget version of the facts is available here.)
• Apples stock bounces back within the day but not without a good number of angry investors calling for an SEC investigation.

The 1982 Johnson & Johnson’s Tylenol crisis remains one of the great examples of effective management in the CM field. . .