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Associations continue to galvanize professional expertise among their members and staffs as they hasten to respond to the public threat posed by a unique strain of swine flu that has killed close to 70 Mexican citizens and sickened almost 1,000 more in both Mexico and the United States.

• As part of its Get Ready pandemic flu strategy, the American Public Health Association has set up a superb website. Included on the site are the what-to-dos of a pandemic flu outbreak, a PDF of a chapter on influenza from a recent edition of its Control of Communicable Diseases Manual, and an aggregated list of pandemic-related blog posts. Resources for the public are in both English and Spanish.

The site also includes a transcript of the CDC’s April 24 briefing about the outbreak investigation and two question-and-answer sessions with trained APHA “Get Ready” experts on how animal diseases are transferred and how to protect children during an outbreak.

• The Infectious Diseases Society of America issued an April 21 dispatch in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report describing two cases with no known exposure to swine.

• Infectious Disease Association of California has issued guidelines for clinicians to help them identify possible patients suffering from this strain of swine flu.