FLU season is about to descend – but as sick Americans take to their beds, their sneezes, groans and sniffles will be garnering attention in the most unlikely of places.
In a radical – and some say controversial – initiative set up in partnership with the US federal government's Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Google, the internet search engine, has devised a way of monitoring flu outbreaks around the
country by tracking users' searches relating to the illness. Google Flu Trends will act as an early-warning system by monitoring every time a user enters key words such as "flu symptoms" and "muscle aches".
The data will be fed to the CDC to assist in mapping areas of high activity, which in turn helps it to pump vaccine supplies to the most-needed areas to protect those not yet infected and alert medics to the need to increase drug stocks.
Trials of Google Flu Trends last year yielded effective data, the CDC said, and proved a close correlation between the level of internet searches relating to flu and the numbers of cases subsequently reported to doctors. "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," said Dr Lyn Finelli, the chief of flu surveillance at the CDC.
Up to 20 per cent of the population suffers from flu each year in America. More than 200,000 people are hospitalised from flu complications, including 20,000 children, and about 36,000 people die as a result. Pharmaceutical companies have prepared 145 million doses of vaccine for the coming season.
Google has been criticised for aspects of its user privacy policies and data collection practices that allow it to record users' internet activity.
But it insists that while Google Flu Trends can identify users' general geographical whereabouts, it cannot identify individual users as it merely takes an aggregate figure of how often particular searches occur in a week.
"Traditional flu surveillance systems take one-two weeks to collect and release 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," it said.
