Word: april
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...official health reports, giving communities precious time to protect themselves and hopefully contain the spread of an infectious disease like influenza. Another surveillance company, Veratect, based in Kirkland, Wash., says it picked up the first signs of H1N1 in La Gloria, in Veracruz state, Mexico, as early as April 6, when it received reports of a "strange" respiratory illness there - some 18 days before the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the rest of the country, was alerted to the existence of the new virus...
...reports and government resources for keywords related to infectious-disease outbreaks and using satellite images of weather patterns to detect and predict the progress of global events like disease and civil unrest. Veratect sources first picked up reports of human respiratory disease at a pig farm in Mexico on April 6; additional reports of a similar illness surfaced on April 16, which is when the company got concerned enough to e-mail officials at the CDC. The CDC was actually already connected to the Veratect news feed (in January, Veratect provided the CDC complimentary access to its system to test...
...predictive power of Google's system is relatively imprecise, since it depends solely on a large number of people getting sick and hitting their computers. That's why the H1N1 cases did not pop up as anything unusual in late March and early April. Even today, with more than 400 cases of H1N1 now confirmed in 38 U.S. states, the caseload is too small to register on Google's radar. It would take thousands, not hundreds, of likely infected people searching for help to distinguish a growing trend from the noise of queries in Google's database...
...TAURUS: APRIL...
...success on a far greater scale. The CDC, which began experimenting with social media three years ago, has created a raft of YouTube videos, podcasts, webpage widgets and Twitter-size feeds to inform the public about the latest news on the H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu. Between April 22 and May 4, the CDC received 1.2 million views of flu-related material on YouTube and 46.6 million Web-page views, and attracted 99,000 followers on its Twitter feed "CDCemergency," which provides breaking updates on health issues. Janice Nall of the CDC's Center for Health Marketing says...