Joe's assignment is to choose an emerging infectious disease and write a report that includes information about prevalence, effects, and treatment for the disease and gives strategies for prevention.
Joe can't decide on a disease right off, so he plans to do a general search first. Because his key words—emerging, infectious, diseases—are common, he chooses to enclose his terms in parentheses for a string search (to limit the overall number of hits and increase their likely appropriateness). His string includes the singular disease rather than the plural diseases to avoid eliminating sites that use the singular form of the phrase.
SEARCH: "emerging infectious disease"
He examines the titles, descriptions, and URLs of the sites that the search engine finds. The second item on the list is a brochure about emerging infectious diseases published by a government agency (obvious from the domain abbreviation "gov")—the CDC. He chooses to check out this site because government agencies are a likely source of solid health information.
The site gives Joe an overview of emerging infections, including many examples of specific diseases. From the examples given, he chooses his specific research topic: illness from Escherichia coli O157:H7. To avoid spelling errors—and because he can't tell whether the disease name includes a zero or a capital letter "O"—Joe copies the disease name and then uses the paste command after he returns to the search engine. He again performs a string search:
SEARCH: "Escherichia coli O157:H7"
The list of sites returned by this search includes several good research candidates: Another brochure from a CDC site that focuses specifically on preventing Escherichia coli O157:H7 illness and an FDA page about Escherichia coli O157:H7 in a document entitled The Bad Bug Book. The first of these sites has additional links regarding food safety, including an entire site on safe handling of ground meat. The second includes graphs with the number of cases reported in the U.S. each year. The list of sites from this search also includes journal articles about specific disease outbreaks; these provide interesting examples for Joe's report.
To round out his report, Joe wants information about Escherichia coli O157:H7 illness outside the United States—how common is it abroad and do travelers need to worry or take any special precautions. He does another search for Escherichia coli O157:H7, with an additional search term. Because he wants all sites relating to travel or traveling or travelers, he uses a "wildcard" in his search term.
SEARCH: "Escherichia coli O157:H7" +travel*
One of the first sites returned by this search is a fact sheet entitled "New and Re-emerging infectious diseases" with a URL that indicates it's an international site (
http://www.who.int/inf-fs/en/fact097.html); from the URL, Joe suspects it may be a document from the World Health Organization, which it proves to be. Although it is too general to provide the specific information he wants, it gives a reference and link to other WHO fact sheets; one of these covers Escherichia coli O157:H7 and provides additional safety tips.So . . . Joe writes his report (and never looks at a hamburger the same way again).
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