Word: outbreaks
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That behavior is exactly what the folks at Google are counting on. Since last fall, the search-engine giant has been nurturing a spin-off service called Google Flu Trends, which aims to identify outbreaks by tracking searches for flu-related terms and provide health officials with early warnings of potential epidemics. The reasoning is that if people are searching for information on the flu, they're probably sick themselves or know someone who is - and a geographic cluster of like-minded Googlers could represent a burgeoning outbreak or, worse, the roots of a new pandemic. (In the case...
Where Google Flu Trends may prove more useful, however, is in the tracking of an epidemic once it is under way. If the current H1N1 outbreak were to worsen and start to spread more quickly, then Google's system may be able to keep pace with it and alert health officials immediately as the problem grows. "If the disease starts spreading in a particular area, for example, and affects thousands of people, then we hope that our system would detect that within 24 hours," says Ginsberg. The idea would be to catch the rise in cases before too many people...
Besser: That's been a question that has come up many times. The first definitive case of H1N1 was not diagnosed in Mexico, but in San Diego. So at the time that the outbreak was first diagnosed, it was already in the U.S. Our pandemic planning, overarching planning that was done largely around avian flu, had approached or looked at [an outbreak that] would originate off our shores. Then you could send in a team and attempt to contain it, if it were in a small area. Once it moved out of a small area, it's impossible to contain...
...addition to that, there is modeling data that shows even if an outbreak starts far away, if it's not contained, a border strategy will gain you 10 weeks, at most, in terms of distributing and standing surveillance. Once it's inside your borders, that's not effective - by the time you know it's there, it's likely to be in many places. So all along, I've been trying to get a message out that the virus is likely all over. We're finding it in many parts of the country...
...April 23, Mexican health authorities rushed anti-virals to hospitals and found they were very effective. But many who had started suffering before had already developed severe pneumonia; and for some, it was too late to be saved. The errors in treatment in the first weeks of the outbreak do much to explain the higher death rate in Mexico than the United States. By Monday, the Mexican government had confirmed 26 deaths that were caused by the swine flu virus, compared to one north of the border...