The first clue of the outbreak appears to be 27 November 2002 when Canada's Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), an electronic warning system that is part of the World Health Organization's Global Outbreak and Alert Response Network (GOARN), picked up reports of a "flu outbreak" in China through Internet media monitoring and analysis and sent them to the WHO. Importantly, while GPHIN's capability had recently been upgraded to enable Arabic, Chinese, English, French,