Two health emergencies are unfolding at the same time. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, an Ebola outbreak caused by the Bundibugyo virus has been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, with over 750 suspected cases and around 170 suspected deaths as of late May. The Bundibugyo strain has no approved vaccine or specific treatment, and the outbreak has already spread across multiple provinces and crossed an international border. Meanwhile, a hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius has left nine confirmed and probable cases and three deaths as of early May among passengers from 23 countries, with people now being monitored in medical facilities on multiple continents.
We’re encountering both events through the same channels: trending names, live blogs, a scrolling feed of updates that adds information faster than it adds clarity. We can recite death tolls and country names within minutes of opening a news app, but the question underneath all the others remains stubbornly out of reach. How worried should we be? And how would we know if that changes?
The institutions investigating these outbreaks publish their own findings in structured documents that address both of those questions. They explain the reasoning behind each assessment and describe what new evidence would cause the assessment to shift. These documents are public and free, updated as new information arrives, but they’re not widely known and few of us have been walked through how to find or read them.
“I keep seeing headlines about Ebola and hantavirus at the same time and I can’t tell how scared I should be about either one. The news gives me numbers and quotes but I don’t know how to make sense of any of it. A friend told me to just look at the WHO website, but when I got there I had no idea what I was reading or where to start. Where do I go to find information I can actually understand and trust?”
— Mara K.
A note before we begin: Thank you for being here, whether you’re a free or paid subscriber. This post covers where to find primary source health documents and what makes them different from news coverage (available to everyone). The full walkthrough of how to read a WHO Disease Outbreak News page, how to decode a CDC Health Alert Network notice, a guide to national and regional health agencies around the world, and a complete reference list of sources for any future health emergency is available for paid subscribers.
The World Health Organization (WHO), national agencies like the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), continental bodies like Africa CDC and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), and their counterparts around the world publish their investigative findings as they go. These documents are freely accessible online, and they contain the answers to the questions news coverage often compresses away: how certain is the assessment, what evidence supports it, what’s still unknown, and what would change the picture. Once we know where to find them and what to look for on the page, we can use them for any health event.
News coverage of a disease outbreak draws on a smaller body of original evidence. Somewhere upstream, an institution is collecting samples, sequencing the virus, interviewing patients, and tracing contacts. That institution publishes its findings in a structured document, and in library science, that document is called a primary source: the original material that every subsequent account is built from. For disease outbreaks, the most comprehensive primary source regularly available to the public is generally published by WHO in a format called the Disease Outbreak News, or DON.
A news headline might tell us “WHO says global risk is low.” A DON tells us why WHO reached that conclusion, what factors informed the assessment, how much of the evidence is laboratory-confirmed, and what new data would cause the conclusion to change. News coverage compresses that structural depth out because of how it operates: the need for speed and the pressure to distill complex assessments into short sentences. The primary source preserves that depth, and that’s what makes the difference between receiving a conclusion and being equipped to evaluate one.
For both the Ebola and hantavirus outbreaks, these primary source documents are available right now. WHO has published Disease Outbreak News updates for both events, and the CDC has issued Health Alert Network notices for each. For the Ebola outbreak specifically, Africa CDC has declared a Public Health Emergency of Continental Security and is publishing its own situation reports and technical guidance. The pages are public and free, and the structural features that set them apart from news coverage become clear the moment we open one.
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