Google puts flu tracker to work on swine flu

[northamericancitizen]

Source: Reuters UK

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Using a new tracking tool, search engine giant Google said on Wednesday it saw a spike in searches for information about flu among people in Mexico last week even before news of the outbreak became widely known.

Google said it has put together a flu trends tracking system for Mexico based on the U.S. Google Flu tool launched last fall that is used by U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to figure out where influenza is heating up.

snip

Ginsberg said the group has also seen a spike in U.S.-related flu searches that correspond with increases in U.S. cases being reported.

He said the hope is that the tool might offer one more way to predict hot spots in an outbreak as they happen.

"If it spreads quickly, it may give public health officials the chance to respond quickly," he said.

snip

''In the United States we have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when selected flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. For the United States, we compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States. Our results have been published in Nature.

During the 2007-2008 flu season, an early version of Google Flu Trends was used to share results each week with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the Influenza Division at US CDC. Across each of the nine surveillance regions of the United States, we were able to accurately estimate current flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports.''

Read more: http://uk.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUKTRE53S8K120090429?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0

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Interesting, maybe helpful, but certainly a bit scary...

[Name removed]

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[greyl]

2. If you want that link in your signature to do any good,

you might want to add a "d" to it. ;)