Results for global events on English (Table 1) show an advantage for the F-statistic if we are primarily concerned with sensitivity (recall) and alerting rates (shown in column B ). However the F-statistic has a clear disadvantage with PPV (precision) which impacts heavily on the number of false alarms. This can be seen clearly by comparing the alarm rate per 100 days of 16.2 in column A with the ProMED average of 7.4. Both advantages and disadvantages are amplified when we add cross-lingual events.