ABSTRACT
In May 2011, the final report of the Review Committee into the World Health Organization's (WHO) response to the 2009–2010 H1N1 pandemic highlighted the significance of ‘initial event information’ in enabling it to improve global public health governance (WHO 2011: 71). In particular, ‘information sources in the public domain, such as new media websites’ were cited as an ‘important source […] for the WHO' (WHO 2011: 71). Consequently, the Committee recommended that the WHO enhance its central repository on epidemic information to include ‘more events’ in addition to ‘expanding information on each event’ (WHO 2011: 13). Meeting this recommendation requires further event-based surveillance.
