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Want to know how bad the flu is in your state? Ask Google.

The all-knowing search engine has a new tool, Google Flu Trends, that estimates U.S. flu activity up to two weeks earlier than government disease trackers.

The gadget compiles the info by aggregating search queries for the virus geographically. It then spits out daily estimates of where outbreaks are likely. (The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides weekly updates based on reports on flu activity from doctors around the country). "We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms," Google said yesterday in an explanation of the tool on its Web site. "Of course, not every person who searches for 'flu' is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together."

When Google compared an early version of its Flu Trends last year with the CDC's own records, it accurately estimated the extent of disease up to two weeks more quickly in each of the agency's nine surveillance areas, Google said. "By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza," Google said.

Lyn Finelli, head of the CDC's flu surveillance division, agreed. "This could conceivably provide as early a warning of an outbreak as any system," Finelli told the New York Times, noting that many people often search online for flu symptoms before calling their doctor. "The earlier the warning," she added, "the earlier prevention and control measures can be put in place, and this could prevent cases of influenza."

Some 200,000 people are hospitalized with the flu and 36,000 die of it in the U.S. each year, according to the CDC. But skeptics say the gadget isn't better than collecting information on flu-related visits to local emergency rooms. “We don’t have any evidence that this is more timely than our emergency room data,” Farzad Mostashari, assistant commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, told the Times.

Right now, Google Flu Trends is only tracking the virus in the U.S., according to the newspaper, though it hopes to eventually expand to other countries and diseases. But will there be a digital divide in the gadget's success, which depends on people's use of the Internet? Authorities are having a hard enough time tracking a new spike in cholera in the Democratic Republic of Congo; are refugees there going to be searching Google for symptoms?

Image by iStockphoto/Joseph Jean Rolland Dubé

5 Comments

1. 1. EngdahlJohnson 11:00 PM 11/12/08

   The Google Flu development is part of a larger movement toward electronic health records (EHR). Collected data on healthcare and care providers helps identify the best care options and successful providers, all aimed at affordable healthcare. EHR goes beyond this intriguing flu tracking, whoissick.org, and earlier online tools such as WebMD to identify, for example, diabetes or heart disease outbreaks. All of these parts taken together can help us become smarter about our healthcare.
   
   Emerging EHR efforts get a big push in Seattle on Dec. 1 at the Healthcare Town Hall meeting of elected officials, healthcare experts, and data and technology providers discussing healthcare reform and electronic health records. www.healthcaretownhall.com . Free and open to the public at 7:30 p.m. at Seattle's Town Hall.
   Question? Email: townhall@milliman.com
   

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2. 2. 52blue 04:24 PM 11/17/08

   I wonder about other uses of this. How many people need to Google search a relevant term for anything interesting to have a chance to emerge from the babble? The report on methods used might be available to the press later this week, says the Nature press office. Flu experts here in metro San Francisco suggest flu tracking by Google may be more valuable where there are no sentinel labs: http://pub.ucsf.edu/today/cache/feature/200811173.html
   Jeff N.

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3. 3. Health Care Tracker 10:39 AM 1/21/09

   Glad to know that Google is so involved with tracking health care information. We all need to track our own health care information. We never know when an emergency can happen. We could be traveling or even hiking out in a remote area and need access to our health care information. I think we need to have it on us not necessarily on a website.

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4. 4. DamionO 05:20 AM 2/13/09

   There's a lot about some of the most common diseases that people don't know – for instance, a study from Oregon State University concluded that the flu virus survives best when the absolute humidity is low, like it usually is in winter. Absolute humidity is the ratio of actual water in the air. Your payday loans source cautions everyone to wash their hands regularly, because that's the best way to guard against infection. The better we all practice hygiene, the less likely we'll have to get <a href="http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2009/02/11/payday-loans-low-humidity-flu/">payday loans</a> to pay for a prescription.

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5. 5. eysenbach 10:51 AM 5/1/09

   Please stop positioning Google Flutrends as a "Google invention" and regurgitating Google press releases.
   
   The idea to look at search data as early warning systems for flu outbreaks is not a Google invention, but was actually already proposed over 3 years ago (published 2006), by researchers from the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation and University of Toronto.
   
   
   Eysenbach G. Infodemiology: tracking flu-related searches on the web for syndromic surveillance. AMIA Annu Symp Proc 2006:244-248
   http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=17238340
   
   Eysenbach G. Infodemiology and Infoveillance: Framework for an Emerging Set of Public Health Informatics Methods to Analyze Search, Communication and Publication Behavior on the Internet
   J Med Internet Res 2009;11(1):e11
   URL: http://www.jmir.org/2009/1/e11
   
   The Virus Chasers
   http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/35061.html
   CIHR Newsarticle (2007) about the infodemiology / infoveillance work at the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation in Toronto

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