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Health

Site is Sickipedia for germ-phobic

Don't suffer alone - click to see who's sick too.

By KATHLEEN HOM, Washington Post
Published September 4, 2007

You should be going to school or work, but you're a bit germ-phobic and want to know if there is something more than rumors going around the halls. There may be a new Web site just for you: whoissick.org/sickness.

The site is a wide-ranging and wholly unscientific catalog of self-reported symptoms. Think of it as the Sickipedia of current symptoms - with all the problems (and benefits) that user-generated content presents.

Information on Who Is Sick, created by Los Angeles resident P.T. Lee, is submitted by users primarily from the United States and Australia. (That's where the site received early media attention.)

The first time you visit, a map of Los Angeles appears, dotted with pie charts, segmented to reflect the symptoms that anonymous posters log in to the site - such as runny nose, cough, fever, headache, muscle ache and stomach ache.

You can post your personal ailments or conduct a search for illness symptoms by ZIP code, time period, age, sex or symptom. But if you search by ZIP, you may find no one there has posted any symptoms.

For example, in a recent eight-week period in the Washington area, 331 postings were put up, with runny noses (28 percent of the total) and coughs (23 percent) the most common symptoms.

Unfortunately, that's where the information stops.

Because Who Is Sick is not tied to any reputable medical site, it doesn't tell you what illnesses these symptoms may represent. Visitors can only guess whether runny noses are due to spring allergies - or muscle aches to a spike in warm-weather activities - rather than a major disease outbreak.

Nor can you diagnose your own ailment or find out what you can do to relieve symptoms. For that, try peer-reviewed medical sites such as www.webmd.com, www.mercksource.com or www.healthcentral.com.

Like Wikipedia, the information on Who Is Sick is only as reliable as the sum of the parts - and honesty - of its anonymous posters.

Lee is aware of these issues. The site, he says, is "just one additional resource. Our hope is that people realize it's user-provided information and there's a limit to that. We aren't the Gospel."

On the Web

Feeling poorly?

Check out the site at whoissick.org/sickness.

[Last modified September 3, 2007, 20:35:32]