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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/technology/internet/12flu.html
The New York Times has this article detailing the CDC/Google partnership to provide data on searches about the flu. This is particularly interesting to me due to some of the research I did in my Systems Engineering project work in a previous life. The point of the research was to look at what a public health group could do to poll data from hospitals. I looked at the ways hospitals stored data, and the possible ways of creating a standard database system, or translation layer to allow a large city like NYC to be able to know there was an outbreak. This type of system would be better than relying on individual hospitals to signal an outbreak, since it would be able to tell if 20 people went to 20 different hospitals with the same symptoms. However, the sheer cost and effort makes this system pretty difficult to implement. There is some interest from the homeland security side, especially in bioterrorism prevention and containment. There were some interesting thoughts on using a peer-to-peer system (the rage at the time), but I wonder if any of our new Web 2.0 tools would help in this…
What Google has done is go to the other side of the equation… They are not polling the hospitals, because that data is pretty tough to translate, and very difficult to aggregate. Plus, the timeliness of the data varies by the hospital and their practices. In this way, Google is going to the user of their search and looking for key terms. These terms and IP addresses would help them to figure out where (in the general sense) there might be a rising trend. It’s not without its faults however, as it relies on the user to know how to search for flu-like symptoms. “Flu”, or “Flu symptoms” could be easily tracked, but “muscle soreness” or “fever” have ambiguous causes. I think this could be valuable in cases where people know what they have. In cases where it requires a doctor to know, this might not work as well.
Light reading for the interested:
International Society for Disease Surveillance
CDC’s website for Syndromic Surveillance
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