San Francisco - Not satisfied with reinventing the internet,
Google's boffins have now come up with a system to track the spread
of flu across the United States by referencing the terms used in
Google searches.
The system, called Google Flu Trends, plots the location of
searches for flu-related terms, to come up with a flu map. The early-
warning data is then passed on to the US Centres for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) based in Atlanta, Georgia, 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 Dr
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 ... an early warning signal for flu
activity.'
Between five to 20 per cent of the US population contracts the flu
each year, Finelli told the New York Times Wednesday, leading to
roughly 36,000 deaths on average.
Google developed the model by comparing hundreds of billions of
Google searches with CDC data on outbreaks. 'Our team found that
certain aggregated search queries tend to be very common during flu
season each year,' Google said in their official blog on the topic.
'We found that there's a very close relationship between the
frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are
experiencing flu-like symptoms each week,' the blog said.
'This seems like a really clever way of using data that is created
unintentionally by the users of Google to see patterns in the world
that would otherwise be invisible,' said Thomas W Malone, a professor
at the MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
'I think we are just scratching the surface of what's possible
with collective intelligence.'
Google Flu Trends is accessed at: http://www.google.org/flutrends/
USA
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