The flu makes its rounds every year, causing people to miss work or school, and instead spend their time with runny noses, body aches, and other symptoms.

These same people also use Google to find remedies to their illness, and Google is now using that data to track flu activity.

Google’s goal is to give people a head’s up on when the flu is about to hit their area, and in cooperation with the CDC in the United States, are able to tell up to two weeks before the CDC reports it, what kind of influenza to protect ourselves against through medications or altering our lifestyles.

The idea isn’t to replace traditional systems that track illness, but rather to work with them to deliver the data to the public faster, enabling health providers to be more proactive against sickness, instead of reactive.

The Google Flu Trends website states, “We compared our query counts (what people searched for) with data from 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.”

Canada also has a system that tracks influenza across the country, and by surveying local schools and hospitals, can better understand which flus and colds are more active.

“We have our own flu systems. They take data from all the provinces,” says Trina Alford, who is the Immunization Coordinator for Chinook Health. As for the Google tool itself, she says to “give it a few years, see what comes out of it.”

Alford is curious how specific the Google data is, whether it’s by state, region, city, or otherwise, and she’s quite optimistic at the potential for what the data could be used for. She says it’s nice to see people are searching for more then just Britney Spears, and the data is being used for something useful.

As for user privacy, “[the data will] never be used to identify individual users. The patterns we observe in the data are only meaningful across large populations of Google search users.”

“It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza,” the flu trends website explains.

Google Trends currently only covers the United States, but if it takes off, it may comes to Canada, or go worldwide, though the website doesn’t speculate. But for now, as Alford says, “it’s incredibly interesting.

Originally posted 2008-11-27 14:16:54. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

  • Share/Bookmark