Psst, want the latest on bird flu?
The Australian government has set up a rumour surveillance program as part of its response to the threat of an avian influenza pandemic.
The program includes daily monitoring of online discussion forums and communicable disease websites to sort fact from fiction, says a health department spokesperson.
Officials also sift through incidents reported by the international and Australian media, including wire agencies and local newspapers.
"It's part of a suite of surveillance and only a small part but it can be very informative," the spokesperson says.
"For each [rumour] that's found, all efforts are then made to verify it."
A new pandemic?
The World Health Organization has issued a series of warnings about the H5N1 bird flu strain, which is currently endemic among poultry in parts of Asia and has resulted in at least 46 confirmed deaths since January 2004.
Global health authorities are concerned that H5N1 could mutate into a human form, sparking a deadly outbreak as bad as the Spanish flu pandemic of 1915 that killed about 50 million people.
The health department first used rumour surveillance in Australia during the 2003 outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. And a number of countries including Canada have adopted this approach for avian flu.
The health department spokesperson says the program is designed to bolster the government's information and provide as much detail as possible for daily incident reports.
"From time to time the stories are blown out of proportion. But at the end of the day a lot of information is gained from media reports before official reports."
But does it work?
Gina Samaan of the Australian National University in Canberra reports on H5N1 rumour surveillance in the current issue of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.
Samaan focuses on surveillance by the WHO's Western Pacific Regional Office following an outbreak of H5N1 among 14 people in Vietnam during January 2004.
She says 40 rumours concerning 12 countries were identified between 20 January and 26 February 2004.
The rumours were sourced from the media, the WHO network, embassy staff and the online emerging diseases discussion forum ProMed, which is run by the International Society for Infectious Diseases.
Nine of the rumours, or 23%, were confirmed to be true. One rumour that turned out to be false was that pigs were infected with H5N1.
Samaan concludes that the WHO rumour surveillance program was "crucial" in preventing the further spread of avian flu
"Through rumour surveillance, WHO assisted affected countries by issuing guidelines, providing technical expertise and mobilising supplies," she says.
"Unaffected countries also took action by banning the importation of poultry from affected countries."
She says the practice of rumour surveillance is likely to increase with draft WHO guidelines requiring the need to verify rumours of public health risks that may involve the international spread of disease.