Editorial policy

OutbreakThreat publishes outbreak signals and health briefs that aggregate public information from official agencies and reputable sources. This editorial policy explains how we select, verify, and present that information. Our goal is to help readers find verifiable outbreak notices quickly - not to replace professional medical judgment or official public-health guidance.

Source selection

We prioritize sources in this order:

1. Official government and international health agencies (WHO, CDC, FDA, ECDC, PAHO)
2. State and local public health departments with public notice portals
3. University epidemiology programs and peer-reviewed surveillance reports
4. Reputable secondary synthesis from established health media, when primary sources are cited

We do not publish signals from anonymous social media posts, unsourced blogs, or outlets with a history of health misinformation. Low-confidence or single-source items may appear as Watch-tier signals, which are hidden from default browsing and never used for subscriber email alerts.

How we write summaries

• Every published brief must cite at least one verifiable source URL that readers can open to confirm the underlying claim.
• We use plain English and avoid sensational language. Terms like “outbreak,” “alert,” and “signal” reflect what agencies have already published - not our own risk assessment.
• Geographic claims are attributed to the publisher's wording. If an agency names a county, we use that county; we do not infer broader or narrower geography.
• Medical claims (symptoms, prevention, treatment) are paraphrased from agency guidance with a source link. We do not offer original clinical advice.

Credibility tiers

• Official - sourced from a government agency or established international health body. These signals appear in default browsing and may trigger email alerts.
• Emerging - supported by reputable secondary reporting or corroborated by multiple sources, but official confirmation may still be pending.
• Watch - weakly verified or single-source. Hidden from default browsing and excluded from email alerts unless an administrator explicitly enables them.

Human review process

Automated ingestion fetches agency feeds, but humans decide what becomes a published report or indexed guide. Editors open the primary URL, compare geography and dates to our summary, and reject or noindex duplicate story-map alerts that mirror an existing report. Thin FDA recall templates and generic WHO reposts without an editorial pack stay available on /alerts for users but are not submitted to search as indexable landing pages.

We do not claim medical or clinical review. “Reviewed for source accuracy” means an editor confirmed that our prose matches the linked agency notice on the publication date shown.

What we exclude from indexing

• Duplicate /alerts/story-map-* URLs (canonical editorial content lives under /stories/)
• Seed or demo content paths
• Alert rows that only mirror an agency title without an OutbreakThreat editorial pack
• Thin location or disease hubs without enough publisher-backed signals
• Account, subscribe, login, and admin routes

Updates and corrections

When an agency updates or retracts a notice, we update our summary accordingly and note the revision date. If we discover an error in our own summary - geographic attribution, disease identification, or source link - we correct it promptly and note the change at the top of the affected brief.

See our full corrections policy.

Independence and advertising

OutbreakThreat is editorially independent. Advertising revenue does not influence which signals are published, which diseases are tracked, or how summaries are written. Ad placements are visually labeled and separated from editorial content.