Collaborative Research: Social Networking Tools to Enable Collaboration in the Tobacco Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Evaluation Network (TSEEN)

美国癌症协会的一份广为人知的报告指出，癌症已超过心脏病，成为当今美国85岁以下成年人的头号杀手。排在首位的是肺癌，这是一种明显可以预防的疾病。应对癌症等公共卫生威胁是系统范围内的严峻挑战，将受益于以网络为中心的方法。例如，当烟草研究界意识到他们花了十多年的时间才发现，他们已经收集了大量的实证证据，分布在其烟草研究人员网络中，表明“轻”(低焦油/低尼古丁品牌)香烟既不能减少接触癌症的机会，也不能降低患癌症的风险，研究人员开始理解在整个社区有效共享资源和信息的重要性。作为回应，参与公共卫生的政府机构在开发数字政府网络基础设施--烟草系统集成网格(TobacSIG)--方面进行了大量的基础投资，以实现烟草监测、流行病学和评估网络(TSEEN)内的协作。虽然这样的基础网络基础设施是先决条件，但发现的延迟(例如上文提到的“轻”烟的致癌作用)促使TSEEN社区强调，需要社交网络转介工具，作为提高其协作系统效率的任何努力的关键组成部分。

A highly publicized report by the American Cancer Society noted that cancer has surpassed heart disease to become the number one killer of adults under the age of 85 in the United States today. At the top of the list was lung cancer, a disease that is eminently preventable. Addressing public health threats like cancer are acute, system-wide challenges that would benefit from network-centric approaches. For example, when the tobacco research community realized it had taken over a decade to discover that they had already collected substantial empirical evidence, distributed across its network of tobacco researchers, indicating that 'light' (low-tar/low-nicotine brands) cigarettes reduced neither exposure to nor risk of cancer, researchers began to understand the importance of effectively sharing resources and information across the entire community. In response, government agencies involved in public health have made a substantial foundational investment in developing a digital government cyberinfrastructure--Tobacco Systems integration Grid (TobacSIG)--to enable collaboration within the Tobacco Surveillance, Epidemiology, and Evaluation Network (TSEEN). While such an underlying cyberinfrastructure is a prerequisite, delays in discoveries (such as the carcinogenic effects of 'light' cigarette mentioned above) have prompted the TSEEN community to underscore the need for social network referral tools as a crucial component of any effort to enhance the efficacy of their collaboration system.