The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal report on Google Flu Trends, a Web site that maps flu outbreaks based on people’s searches for terms related to the flu.
Flu Trends was created with guidance from the CDC’s flu surveillance team and the leader of that group says it “maps very closely to the influenza-like trends that we see in the U.S.”
Flu Trends was built in collaboration with Google.org’s Predict and Prevent Initiative, a global health program that is focused on emerging infectious diseases. This article in Wired profiles the director of that program, Mark Smolinski, a doctor whose interest in outbreaks was sparked when he found himself in the middle of the 1993 hantavirus outbreak in Arizona.
This speech, delivered by Google.org’s Larry Brilliant, M.D., M.P.H., at the March 2008 International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases, outlines the initiative and offers some insight into its future. “Our initiative is about better detection and identifying hot spots. If we do this correctly we will be able to shift the curve to the left and feed the information into integrated early warning and response systems,” Brilliant said in the speech.
