Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dec. 27, 2006WASHINGTON – Without much prior planning and at very little cost, cell phones are becoming a key part of the worldwide effort to stay ahead of influenza and other diseases. In Cambodia, a public health official gave mobile telephones to untrained villagers and told them to call him if chickens and ducks started dying, often a sign of the appearance of avian influenza. The U.S. Navy is funding a Peruvian program in which nearly 50,000 reports of health problems from diarrhea to dengue fever are being collected annually. A Washington firm is training health workers in Indonesia to use text messaging technology to provide information on new cases of flu. Besides being cheap, the phones cut days off the time normally required to learn of local outbreaks that could become pandemics. James LeDuc, professor of global health at the University of Texas Medical Branch, said he was intrigued by the emergence of the cell phone as a critical tool of public health.