Manage Swine Flu and Manage Things at Penn

Several items could help manage the swine flu. The first of which is basic hygiene. Campaigns are already in action to make people constantly sanitize and wash their hands. Washing hands is incredibly effective in preventing the spread of viruses, like the swine flu.

A more complex technology to help manage the flu would be keeping a live-updating electronic database of where sick individuals were. This database could be global and doctors would be forced to enter new information every time a new case was diagnosed. The data could be view by world region, country, country region, state or province, county, town, and so on. Residents could take caution when in infected areas. From a public health stand point the flu could be better contained.

More specifically at UPENN the system could track by which dorm the sick residents are in and how many cases are in each college house or apartment building. This way students could be particular careful when in those areas, and also the people who live in highly infected areas could all get vaccinated to prevent the further spread of the disease. This logistical programming may be more effective at controlling the spread of the swine flu than certain medications.

The system, on both the large and small scale level, could send alerts to residents as to the current situation on not only cases of swine flu, but also where to get vaccines and such.


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