The fear of a possible bird flu pandemic is causing concern to governments and health organisations around the world.
We decided to measure who the world relies on when it comes to information about bird flu.
To measure influence we use a scientifically recognised methodology called citation analysis. (See a more detailed description after the results section)
Measuring influence this way assumes that when a person mentions another person in a particular context then it is because the former person thinks the latter is relevant to the context.
And, since the former thinks the latter is relevant to the context the latter has some influence on the former.
The actual amount of influence is initially irrelevant. It’s whether or not there is influence that matters.
The practicalities of measuring influence this way are to first find everything that has been written about an issue. We achieved this by automatically downloading everything we could find that was freely available on the internet that contained any of the following words or phrases:
“bird flu”
“avian influenza”
”avian flu”
”H5N1”
We then identified who was referencing whom in this context. (A reference can be a textual reference or a hyperlink).
These references were then used as equations in a massive simultaneous equation system that produces the influence of each stakeholder as a result.
Table 1 (above) shows the top 50 influencers on the topic of “Bird Flu”. The Issue Influence Index™ is a linear influence scale ranging from 1 and upwards. An index value of 10 thus means “twice the influence” as index value of 5.
Notice the substantial influence of the top three organisations, WHO, OIE and FAO.
The United Nations in Vietnam most likely gets its influence because several early cases of bird flu and fatalities amongst the human population in Vietnam.
Roche is most likely on the list because they are the principal supplier of the Tamiflu, an anti-influenza drug believed to have some effect on the current virus, H5N1.
(It is clear that the results favours English language media as search parameters, with the exception of “H5N1” are in English.)
Figure 1 (above) shows how the top 50 influencers reference each other. Please bear in mind that all identified stakeholders outside the top 50 have been removed from the network picture.
You can download a more comprehensive version of the results and the methodology here (0.7 MB pdf)