Word: sicklies
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...both recognize and report anything out of the ordinary. Once a community doctor sees what he thinks might be an unusual series of flu cases, for example, he would have to alert his local or state health departments, which would then investigate further by testing samples from the sick patients - a process that could take up to two weeks...
...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 of H1N1, however, the distant and initially small number of cases in the U.S. meant the search service wasn't very...
Still, to the extent that data-tracking systems like Google Flu Trends could operate as early-warning networks for infectious diseases, their benefit is that they rely not on hospital data but real-time information from people who are in the process of getting sick. "What we are seeing are trends of what people are thinking about at home, perhaps before they might go to see a doctor," says Jeremy Ginsberg, lead engineer of Google Flu Trends. (See the top five swine...
...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...
...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 get sick. And that's what the company is hoping it can do in Mexico: give health officials there a sense of where the cases are, and if the outbreak is expanding...