Can Social Media Save Lives?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have launched a social media page that provides all kinds of tools—ranging from highly useful to quite silly—for tracking information about the peanut recalls. The page, co-sponsored by the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services, has the agencies includes blogs, databases of recalled products, widgets of various kinds for outside bloggers to use, links to YouTube channels, podcasts, links to Twitter feeds and the like. And for those of you who insist on getting your diseased-food information while immersed in a virtual world, "CDC Second Life" lets you dress your avatar in a biohazard suit and have it wear an "awareness bracelet."