Search engine giant Google launched a new tool on Tuesday that will help U.S. federal health experts track the annual flu epidemic.
Google Flu Trends uses search terms that people put into the Web-based search engine to figure out where influenza is heating up, and notify the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time.
“We’ve discovered that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity,” Google said in a statement.
“What this does is it takes Google search terms of influenza-like illness and influenza and it emulates a signal that tells us how much influenza activity there was,” Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at the CDC, said in a telephone interview.
it looks like google is lining up for that easy defense money contract…you don’t mention “surveillance” in today’s society without knowing you can make a buck.
your flu isn’t even your own private issue now! Seems to me that the big pharms must love this google concept…nothing like more visual data that leads to quarantine and vaccinations.
EARLY WARNING
“One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data,” Finelli said.
“The data are really, really timely. 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 early warning signal for flu activity.”
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