Search engine giant Google has launched a flu tracking system based on how many people search for flu-related topics.
Google Flu Trends will initially provide data for the United States, but the search engine hopes to cover other countries in the future.
Google says there is a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms.
It adds: “Some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening and are therefore good indicators of flu activity.”
During the last flu season, Google worked with the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in the US and found that its search-based flu estimates had a “consistently strong correlation” with flu data from the CDC’s Influenza Sentinel Provider Surveillance Network.
The Google tool works by comparing estimates based on current search terms with an historical baseline level of flu activity for each region in the US. Depending on whether the estimate is higher or lower than the baseline, the general activity level is reported as minimal, low, moderate, high, or intense.
Google says Flu Trends can act as an early warning system for both health care professionals and patients since search queries can be automatically counted immediately in contrast to the one to two week delay for traditional flu tracking systems.
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