Environmental Health for Environmental Advocates Workshop

I conducted a workshop entitled “Environmental Health for Environmental Advocates” in association with the Tom Farrell Institute for the Environment on May 29^th, 2012.  The purpose of the workshop was to provide a forum in which an extended dialogue around environmental health science and risk assessment, primarily focusing on air pollution and health in the Hunter, could occur.

Flutracking at Skoll Global Threats Meeting in SFO

Myself and Stephen Clarke from Flutracking.net had the good fortune to be invited to the 1st International Conference on Self-reported Influenza-like Illness Surveillance hosted by the Skoll Foundation for Global Threats (a foundation set up by Jeff Skoll - former Ebay CEO) and the American Public Health Association.  Flutracking.net is the second oldest and second largest of the schemes internationally, next to the Dutch system.  We were able to learn a lot from the other surveillance systems.  It seems that Flutracking.net excels  in terms of growth of participants and weekly participation (ours is the shortest survey), however, the Dutch certainly do some very interesting analysis and we will exchange data with them to explore new analyses.  This conference has kicked off an international collaboration and we will attempt to standardise our systems to allow great inter-country comparisons.  Thanks to Jeff Skoll, Larry Brilliant and Mark Smolinski for hosting the event.