ProMED (as it’s commonly known) is an email service with roughly eighty thousand subscribers, devoted to detecting, gathering, and disseminating reliable information about disease events happening moment to moment anywhere in the world. It began in 1994, with a subscribership of forty, and is now run by the International Society for Infectious Diseases, a body of scientists and health care professionals. It’s free. It’s independent and apolitical. It’s relentless, encyclopedic, and sometimes arcane. If you subscribe to ProMED, you might wake up to three or four of its emails on a given
...more
