Page #3
(2007 Article Continued)
THE NEW PARADIGM
Among the hundreds of posters and thousands of viewers on the Mother Abigail threads were; Doctors, Lawyers, Nurses, Pharmacists, Veterinarians and Health Care workers of every stripe.
It became apparent quite early that this was not to be the normal flu talk. This is an early post:
"Doug had an interesting observation in picking a Morbillivirus as a likely agent. Hendra and Nipah are both zoonotic and it might well be a mutant of the Paramyxoviridae family.
Symptoms are right.
"Just because I have had tooooo much coffee, I will mention that both Hendra and Nipah have been given their own genus (Henipavirus).
Henipavirus becomes the fourth genus within the Paramyxovirinae subfamily of the Paramyxoviridae family. The other genera within the subfamily are Rubulavirus, Morbillivirus and Respirovirus."
52 posted on 03/17/2003 10:49:23 PM PST by Mother Abigail"
And so it began.
Why was this different? Because local MD's discovered ProMed, because an army of netizens began searching every corner of our world for information, because citizens of other countries began translating information that would normally be missed - because the whole was larger than the sum of the parts.
One poster who tried to write about Mother Abigail soon after the incident, and was quickly banned, called it SARS Central.
Sounds right to me.
She hijacked a web site, created a forum for the "in depth" discussion of Virology, Taxonomy and Microbiology. But interactive.
And it is that interactivity that opened the flood gates. Now it was possible to monitor breaking news in a far off land, have experts opine on that news, react to their opinions and post information of your own.
NBC Nightly News was never going to be the same.
The "Flu Blog" was born.