Word: systemic
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...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 its utility) when the company again contacted the health agency's operations staff on April 20, as H1N1 cases began to appear, to reinforce concern over what looked like an emerging epidemic...
...system detects something that changes the fabric of everyday life, such as strains in the medical infrastructure or changes in the behavioral patterns of people if they aren't going to work or attending school," says Robert Hart, CEO of Veratect. Trained analysts then investigate suspicious reports to determine if additional investigations are needed or alarm bells should be raised. Veratect follows more than 200 diseases around the world in this way, and argues that its system of computer detection and human interpretation can give health officials enough of an early warning of potential disease outbreaks to ready the appropriate...
...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...
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...
...Weiss, director of surveillance for the Bureau of Communicable Disease in the New York City Department of Health, notes that while systems like Google Flu Trends may be useful, health officials need to remember that the service tracks searches, not confirmed cases of illness or even symptoms that are severe enough to bring a person to the emergency room. Earlier this flu season, for example, when reports of avian influenza overseas hit the news in the U.S., there was a spike in bird flu queries online in New York City. "The system only tells you what people are interested...