One tech website wrote on April 1st that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was adding Twitter to the national emergency response network. That was an April Fool’s Day joke, but the joke isn’t actually that far from reality. FEMA is just one of several federal agencies using Twitter to communicate with citizens about important health and safety topics.
FEMA’s Twitter feed currently has over 2,500 followers and seems to be moderately active, with many direct replies to followers as well as general tweets about FEMA activities.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has several Twitter feeds, including one dedicated to the flu and a general news feed on health topics. The feed most likely to save your life is the one from CDC Emergency Preparedness and Response. This feed has nearly 2,000 followers. Recent Tweets were on the volcano in Alaska, the flooding in North Dakota, and food recalls.
People particularly concerned about the hazards lurking in their kitchen cabinets and refrigerators will want to follow the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recall feed. The over 3,000 followers of this feed are among the first to know about specific items being pulled off the grocery store shelves.
If you want to be alerted about the most recent medical research, check out the National Institutes for Health (NIH) feed. The over 2,600 followers of this feed get updates on NIH podcasts, news, and research matters.
Are these federal feeds proof that Twitter really is entering the mainstream? Many concerns still remain, particularly the lack of any kind of verification process that gives assurance to the average citizen that they really are following who they think they are following. For example, Twitterers "fema," "cdc," and "fda" are clearly unrelated to the U.S. federal agencies of those initials. Savvy users will realize that immediately, but as Twitter expands into the population at large this may cause significant problems.
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