Long-running ProMED email service for alerting world to disease outbreaks is in trouble

The first news about the COVID-19 pandemic came not from a government or a scientific publication, but in an email from a disease-alert system called ProMED . This fateful missive in December 2019 about a few cases of a mysterious pneumonia in Wuhan, China, is just one example of how physicians and public health experts around the world have used the 30-year-old, free service to share real-time information about local disease outbreaks with tens of thousands of subscribers. But ProMED is now on life support. Much of its work came to a screeching halt yesterday when 21 of its 38 paid editors and moderators went on strike. They issued a letter suggesting the service find a new home because of a lack of attention and support from ProMED’s parent organization and sponsor, the International Society for Infectious Diseases (ISID). Three more have since signed on. Weeks earlier, the society acknowledged that ProMED faced a financial crisis and had begun to take actions it hoped would keep the service alive, such as making its 20,000 subscribers pay to access its emails or website. Some scientists see the potential loss of ProMED, whose dispatches have slowed to a trickle, as a blow to researchers and health workers in developing countries who rely on its announcements. “The fiber of ProMED has always been open source and it serves a very broad international community,” says Harvard University epidemiologist John Brownstein. “It provides a real...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research