Automated health surveillance using text mining is not intended as a substitute for skilled human analysts but as these results show, it does have the potential to reduce their information burden if informed choices are used to govern the selection of models. In order to help guide users in the significance of news events we implemented the C2 algorithm for multilingual news alerting in the 'Global Roundup' section of the Bio-Caster Web site at http://biocaster.nii.ac.jp. The results, updated each hour, show the test statistic value, the disease, country, province, focus species daily news frequency and the baseline mean and standard deviation. Additionally, citation links are provided to the news articles with a list up of all languages that contributed to the alert. The output is available as both RSS and a Twitter feed. Obvious improvements to the techniques described here could take place by modeling lower geographic granularity and reducing size differences between geo-units. More sophisticated approaches might incorporate proximity information between events or model how events propagate through news space. A more subtle effect of the granularity restriction is that the models we presented do not allow us to follow what might be called 'late warning' signals. i.e. follow on events within the country's borders. For this reason detecting events below the country level is desirable. Future work will need to concentrate on maximizing system sensitivity to overcome the fragmentation of the event distribution that occurs when we bucket events into smaller geographic units.  Reducing mortality in sepsis: new directions Considerable progress has been made in the past few years in the development of therapeutic interventions that can reduce mortality in sepsis. However, encouraging physicians to put the results of new studies into practice is not always simple. A roundtable was thus convened to provide guidance for clinicians on the integration and implementation of new interventions into the intensive care unit (ICU). Five topics were selected that have been shown in randomized, controlled trials to reduce mortality: limiting the tidal volume in acute lung injury or acute respiratory distress syndrome, early goal-directed therapy, use of drotrecogin alfa (activated), use of moderate doses of steroids, and tight control of blood sugar. One of the principal investigators for each study was invited to participate in the roundtable. The discussions and questions that followed the presentation of data by each panel member enabled a consensus recommendation to be derived regarding when each intervention should be used. Each new intervention has a place in the management of patients with sepsis. Furthermore, and importantly, the therapies are not mutually exclusive; many patients will need a combination of several approaches – an 'ICU package'. The present article provides guidelines from experts in the field on optimal patient selection and timing for each intervention, and provides advice on how to integrate new therapies into ICU practice, including protocol development, so that mortality rates from this disease process can be reduced. Sepsis is the tenth most common cause of death in the US [1] . A recent US study reported that severe sepsis accounts for in excess of 215,000 deaths annually from a total population of approximately 750,000 patients-a mortality rate of approximately 29% (with published studies quoting a range of 28-50%) [2] . This persistent, high mortality rate is clearly unacceptable, given that it ranks sepsis above some of the higher profile causes of in-hospital death, including stroke (12-19% risk of death in the first 30 days) and acute myocardial infarction (AMI) (8% risk of death in the first 30 days) [3] . Moreover, the actual number of deaths associated with the condition may be even higher than current estimates suggest. Many sepsis patients have at least one comorbidity and deaths are often attributed to these conditions rather than to sepsis [4] [5] [6] . Unfamiliarity with the signs and symptoms of sepsis may further hinder accurate diagnosis.