# 5937
Every day a small army of volunteer newshounds go forth in search of infectious disease news – items often buried in Arabic, Chinese, Bahasan, or other non-English news media – which they translate then into English and post on the flu forums.
The Flu Wiki and FluTrackers are the two forums that I visit every day, and the expertise of their newshounds in finding, translating, and interpreting these stories never fails to amaze me.
Many of the stories I write about in this space were first uncovered by these dedicated forum members. If I had to spend my day searching for, and translating, these items I’d have no time to write my blogs.
So I owe them a lot.
I wrote about the skills they employ some time ago in Newshounds: They Cover The Pandemic Front.
No one gets paid for doing this work. And neither of these sites accept advertisement of any sort.
The monthly operating costs either come out of the pockets of the founders, or from generous contributions by members and others interested in seeing this work continue.
The initial cost of setting up and running this type of forums is fairly low. Low traffic volume sites can be run for only a few dollars a month.
But the larger sites are a victim of their own success, as over the years the number of daily visits continue to increase, the size of their archived data expands, and their monthly server costs escalate.
FluTrackers – which was founded in early 2006 – now serves up tens of thousands of page views each day. They see visitors from nearly 200 countries every month, have more than 3000 members, and have archived more more than 350,000 posts.
In order to accommodate this level of traffic, their monthly server costs alone have grown to $351.00 USD per month. Additionally there are other expenses (legal, telephone, internet, etc.) that raise their monthly operating cost to nearly $800 a month.
Since the beginning, most of these operating costs have been covered by founder & editor Sharon Sanders, with additional generous support from their members.
Given the amount of value received, these operating costs are low indeed. But FluTrackers could use some help with these ongoing expenses.
No one likes to ask for money, particularly in these tough financial times. But I’m going to ask my readers to consider making a donation to help keep them online doing this important work.
I know they will appreciate it, and so will I.
FluTrackers.com Inc. is a 501(c)(3) charity, and donations can be made via credit card or Paypal via their front page.
Thanks.
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