Interestingly we found that approximately 80% of news reports covered only about half the ProMED-mail alert disease-country topics, implying that the remaining 20% of news has to provide coverage for almost half the topics. Surprisingly, the trend was broadly similar for both English and all language news. Although the sample size is relatively small, given that the events we chose were from all regions of the world, this implies that having news in more languages may have a deepening effect rather than a broadening effect on event coverage. The three notable exceptions were in the cases of FMD in China (e4 in Figure 1 ), Dengue in Brazil (e12) and Dengue in Bolivia (e13).