IE systems nowadays work very well, but they are mostly monolingual and difficult to convert to other languages. We maybe have then to stop thinking only with traditional pattern-based approaches. Our project, PULS, makes epidemic surveillance through analysis of On-Line News in collaboration with MedISys, developed at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (EC-JRC). PULS had only an English pattern-based system and we worked on a pilot study on French to prepare a multilingual extension. We will present here why we chose to ignore classical approaches and how we can use it with a mainly language-independent based only on discourse properties of press articlestructure. Our results show a precision of 87% and a recall of 93%. And we have good reasons to think that this approach will also be efficient for other languages.