If AIDS emerged in today’s communications-rich era, would we realize it sooner? Not necessarily. The digital divide still leaves Africa comparatively uncovered. (ProMED’s subscription list, for example, has no Nigerian ISPs.) “We would hear news reports if there was some disease eating away at Rwandans and western Ugandans, which caused weight loss and gradual deterioration. But where do you put that down with the burden of malaria and everything else?” asks Jack Woodall, Ph.D., one of ProMED’s founders. “I’m not sure what kinds of bells would ring.”

In other words, extending the reach of the web to every square meter of the earth’s surface means nothing unless the right person in the right place—someone who is curious, who senses that things are awry, who is connected both socially and virtually (a doctor or nurse, perhaps, but then again, maybe a schoolteacher)—cares enough to dash off a few words and press “Send.”

When Catherine Strommen looks back on her unwitting role in alerting the world to SARS, she marvels at the sheer improbability of it all. “It’s very chaos theory or butterfly effect to me,” she says.

And she regrets that she couldn’t tangibly help the stranger named Ben, who never returned to the Teachers.Net site. Strommen is a people person, but the disease-tracking power of the Internet comes from thickly impersonal networks. “I was never able to tell him anything,” she still laments, five years later. “I didn’t get to complete the circuit.”         

 

Madeline Drexler is a Boston-based science journalist, and author of Secret Agents: The Menace of Emerging Infections.