Google Health Service
November 12th, 2008 by Rob Brown
Google’s relentless march to world domination has taken another step with the realisation that the Google Trends search may play a powerful role in the prevention of the spread of viruses and infectious disease.
‘Google Flu trends’ uses a selection of search terms to predict how many people in a particular area are searching for relevant information about flu. Not only have they found that there is an incredible correlation between these searches and numbers of actual cases of flu but they can show incidence of flu far faster than the current official channels in the United States.
Google compared its data with that from a surveillance system managed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Because of the time lag in collating and checking data Google believes it can accurately estimate flu levels one to two weeks faster than published CDC reports. On January 28th 2008 Google flu trends showed a marked increase in ‘flu related searches in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US, the available published CDC data showed no detectable increase for another week.
Google has compared their search data with that of ‘influenza like illnesses’ tracked by the CDC over four years and there is a very close match between the two data sets. The speed at which the Google data is available could prove to be of major importance in the case of a pandemic. It would allow epidemiologists crucial extra time to respond to an outbreak, perhaps saving tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives.
With the sheer volume of searches conducted on Google this real time trend tracking could be used to spot outbreaks of a range of illnesses or identify hot spots for disease giving public health services more time and more information, vital commodities in the battle against ill health.
Tags: , CDC, epidimiologists, epidimiology, flu, flu pandemic, flu virus, google flu trends, google trends, influenza, pandemic, trend tracking, virus
November 12th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
This information is already available in the UK through a project with QResearch and the Health Protection Agency which is freely available.
QResearch is a not-for-profit organisation which is a joint venture between EMIS, the leading primary care system supplier, and the University of Nottingham.
Data is taken from more than 3,500 GP practices covering around 22 million patients and can be provided on a daily basis on a national, regional and local. Not only can it cover inflectious diseases but data can also be used to track the health impact of major incidents such as the Buncefield oil refinery fire on a daily and weekly basis.
So while Google claims tracking can be one to two weeks faster with QResearch using EMIS practices daily analysis is possible.
November 12th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Mark clearly an example where QResearch (disclosure: EMIS is a client) has brought a higher level of sophistication to the tracking and analysis of public health data and are delivering this information in a far more effective way than some of their counterparts in the US
April 27th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
[…] source of information may come from Google. ‘Google Flu trends’ which I wrote about in PR Media Blog last Novemberuses search terms to predict how many people in a particular area are searching for relevant […]