The 2009 H1N1 pandemic illustrated how dependent each country is on the surveillance capacity in other states. Reducing public health risk depends on an overall strengthening of global health event monitoring as well as locally available sources such as clinical data and over-the-counter sales data. The Web provides a low cost surveillance infrastructure that has been shown to offer a timely means of detecting epidemics such as SARS [6] that is often several days ahead of the official reporting curve. In addition to work on BioCaster, there is a small but growing body of work looking at the issues of online public health monitoring such as GPHIN [6] and MedISys/PULS [7] . However, studies providing details of recall/precision/timeliness for end user tasks in media-based health surveillance are still surprisingly limited. To the best of our knowledge no previous study has explored the multilingual effects in this area. Several characteristics of early epidemic detection make the problem particularly challenging. Firstly, we want to catch epidemics as early as possible before they develop into humanitarian crises; Secondly, not every epidemic is of equal importance -those that are of most concern to the international community are described by the International Health Regulations [8] ; Thirdly, patterns of media coverage are complex [9] , at times focussing on dramatic and emotive imagery, at others prioritizing the reader's security and economic interests. In many ways the connection between media interest and the population at risk is often blurred.