VIENNA, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Health officials monitoring emerging diseases and pandemic outbreaks are so flooded with information that they risk missing the really important news, a senior European Union health official said on Friday. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said ahead of a conference in Vienna that news media and the Internet had often been the first sources reporting outbreaks of diseases such as the SARS virus or bird flu. But the technologies used to monitor news media and crawl through Internet sites and other sources were creating an abundance of data and needed to be honed to better filter out the really relevant information, the agency said. "A few years ago people were predicting that the Internet and new technologies such as automated media scanning would make this task easier," said Denis Coulombier, head of the ECDC's Preparedness and Response unit, in a statement. "In fact, almost the reverse has happened," he added. "Epidemic intelligence officers in Europe are often so flooded with information that the 'spam' and 'background noise' risks drowning out the really significant items." Stockholm-based ECDC was started in 2005 to support the EU's epidemic intelligence and monitoring.
