While you wait for Trick-or-Treaters to ring the bell, here are some sites to explore.

Designer Eric Benoit attended Future Insights’ Ultimate Developer Event in Boston and shared a couple of finds.

As the news has spread in all directions we have discovered that the 2014 Ebola outbreak represents not only a healthcare crisis with global impact, but also an information crisis. Even highly respected news outlets can have conflicting information on a single event, so that the stories are confusing and hard to trust. Hours spent poring over the NIH and CDC and WHO sites revealed the common threads of truth, but the details were scattered. There was no straightforward way to get a complete picture.

So, we decided to create a single source of graphical information that could become an international resource. Something that could compliment the Wikipedia page. Clean lines, a classic readable font, with unambiguous colors and icons. Headers in black and white, red for critical information, gray text to let pictures do the talking. Easy to scan and locate the topics before reading closely for details.

All over the news: Ebola Virus Disease

Our RSS feeds are popping up with distressing and confusing stories that are getting uncomfortably close to home. So Juhan Sonin and intern Xinyu Liu put together Understanding Ebloa: A Visual Guide. One clinician enlightened us with the following response:

“This is a remarkable summary. The one thing I can think of that might be missing is an understanding of why Ebola is so contagious. It has, in part at least, to do with what is the viral load of the disease. For example, when someone is at the height of the illness, one-fifth of a teaspoon of that person's blood can carry 10 billion viral Ebola particles. An untreated HIV patient, by comparison, has just 50,000 to 100,000 particles in the same amount of blood. Someone with untreated hepatitis C has between 5 million and 20 million.”

We've distributed the link locally and it has also been picked up by Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare in Ebola: A Crash Course in Reliability. Our research and design work continues as we do what we can to support the worldwide efforts to save lives and stop the spread of this disease.