Google tracks flu outbreaks online
Thu, November 20 2008
The system, called Google Flu Trends, plots the location of searches for influenza-related terms to come up with a flu map. The data is then given to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) which can choose to take preventive action such as distributing more flu vaccines in the affected areas.
The scheme avoids privacy issues by relying only on aggregated data that cannot be traced to individual searchers.
The flu records provide timely data that could be two weeks ahead of government figures. “The data are really, really timely,” said Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at the CDC. “They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used ... (as) an early warning signal for flu activity.”
Between five to 20 per cent of the U.S. population contracts the flu each year, Finelli told the New York Times, leading to roughly 36,000 deaths on average.
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