BBC covers a report from the World Health Organization, which says that new infectious diseases are "emerging at the 'historically unprecedented' rate of one per year," according to the story. (Check out the nifty world map graphic showing where diseases are emerging.) That sure sounds like a rallying call for the 'omics community, which has been instrumental in cases such as the SARS epidemic. WHO strongly advocates "sharing of medical data, skills and technology between rich and poor nations" to help combat the diseases. Sharing medical data is also the subject of the latest post at Jason Bobe's Personal Genome blog. Bobe writes about patient advocacy group PatientsLikeMe, which encourages people to share their healthcare experiences and data in the interest of "speeding up the pace of research and fixing a broken healthcare system" through global collaborations, according to PLM's website.