It seems that New Zealand is not going to be isolated from a possible flu pandemic courtesy of our massive water barriers, mostly because we cross those barriers so frequently.

As the Rangitoto students are confirmed as having the swine flu direct from the source in Mexico, the question is what the rest of us need to do and naturally there are some good resources on the net. Please add any you know about in the comments.

• Unfortunately, the Ministry of Health site was last updated on April 23 so there is nothing new there at the moment. However, the pandemic plan home page is here. (Update) the site is now updated with the new code yellow details.
  Sadly, the site is full of pdf files so access to the information is difficult. Our MoH is definitely not 2.0
• The Herald has an RSS feed for swine flu news here
• For other news and actions, try the FluWiki
• For household preparations Get Pandemic Ready has some useful ideas. The one time having .pdf files is a good idea; download them now because if there really is a pandemic, the internet itself may not last more than a few days.
• Google maps has an outbreak mashup
• More authoritative information at Effect measure

Meanwhile, does your organisation have a pandemic response plan? Where is it? What role does your ICT play in it?

In a bit of shameless self promotion, I've been doing some work on pandemics and ICT over the last few years and you can find some of the material here. I did a Pandemic presentation to a health information management systems conference on the role and conditions for ICT in pandemic response about 18 months ago and most of it still applies.

Comments open, add your resources please.

Welcome back to Groupings blog. Now that you are a regular, please feel free to comment on any story that you feel comfortable with.