Googl​e To Assis​t Pande​mic BioWa​rfare​ Agend​a

[Mrs. Sharon B. Hodge]

Googl​e To Assis​t Pande​mic BioWa​rfare​ Agend​a

How Does Google FLU TREND Work?


November 12, 2008 - Google is tracking the searches of its users in an effort to locate where flu season is most prevalent


November 12, 2008 - We're heading into the heart of cold and flu season, and Google has found a new way to track outbreaks
http://www. kmbc. com/news/17966778/detail. html

***********************************************************
Google predicts spread of flu using huge search data
***********************************************************

New site claims to be able to raise the alarm over flu outbreaks up to two weeks in advance of existing public services

Guardian UK
Ed Pilkington in New York
Alok Jha
Wednesday November 12 2008

http://www. guardian. co. uk/technology/2008/nov/12/google-flu-usa

Google has applied its massive data-collecting power for the first time to the prediction of the spread of disease, with the launch of a new site that claims to be able to raise the alarm over flu outbreaks up to two weeks in advance of existing public services

Google Flu Trends takes the general search tracking technology pioneered by Google trends and applies it specifically to influenza.
The firm's engineers claim to have devised a way of analysing millions of individual searches related to the disease that in tests proved to correlate closely with the actual incidence of illness

That gives them the potential ability to predict spikes in flu cases that in turn could be used by health professionals to warn the public or plan their responses

Google found that if it assembled a cluster of queries people used when they were worried about flu - such as "fly symptoms", "chest congestion" or "where to buy a thermometer" - the aggregated trends were a strong indicator of flu levels across America

"We wanted to step back and see if we couldn't model a real-world phenomenon using search query data," Jeremy Ginsberg, a Google engineer involved in developing the new system, told the Guardian's science podcast.
He added that flu had been chosen as the pioneer illness to be tracked as it was a serious disease that killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world each year

To ascertain the potential accuracy of the data, Google compared its figures against statistics filed over the past five years by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention that has a network of 1,500 doctors across the US who provide weekly reports on the number of patients complaining of flu-like symptoms

"We found we could highly accurately estimate what the flu activity levels would be in subsequent years," Ginsberg said

They also found that the Google statistics, which can be gathered on a daily basis, were up to two weeks ahead of the federal government's data due to the time lag in assembling information from so many doctors

The ability to speed up the response of health services by up to a fortnight could prove invaluable in the event of a vicious outbreak, or the emergence of a new virulent strain

The results of its comparisons with official health statistics will be published in the science journal Nature

So far Google has only rolled out the service to the US, though it hopes to extend it to other countries, and may in time also widen the net to include other illnesses.
At present, the flu data is given for each of the 50 states, though questions have inevitably been raised about whether in time it could be applied to individual cities or even neighbourhoods and if so what possible side-effects that could have for local economies

The company stresses that there are no privacy issues involved as the trends are gathered through combining millions of anonymous searches

But civil liberties groups are already watching Google closely as it rapidly diversifies its data storage capacities

The company has already spread its tentacles into the areas of individual and public health.
It is exploring ways of compiling health information and fusing it with its other services, such as Google maps, and is experimenting with a tool that allows users to store their personal health information through Google sites

The innovation forms part of a frontier technology known as digital detection that is designed to apply online information to public health mapping.
Google recently announced that its philanthropic arm was investing millions of dollars in companies that are at the forefront of tracking the spread of diseases such as Health Map and ProMED that sound the alarm as new outbreaks occur


November 12, 2008 - The search engine Google may become faster at spotting flu outbreaks in the US han the Center for Disease Control, Katie Couric explains


Google Flu Trends Site
http://www. google. org/flutrends/

********************************************************************
GOOGLE REPORTS FLU SEARCHES, LOCATIONS TO FEDS
********************************************************************

SICK SURVEILLANCE: GOOGLE REPORTS FLU SEARCHES, LOCATIONS TO FEDS

Drudge Report
Tue Nov 11 2008

http://www. drudgereport. com/flashgof. htm

GOOGLE will launch a new tool that will help federal officials "track sickness"

"Flu Trends" uses search terms that people put into the web giant to figure out where influenza is heating up, and will notify the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time!

GOOGLE, continuing to work closely with government, claims it would keep individual user data confidential: "GOOGLE FLU TRENDS can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week"

Engineers will capture keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and others

Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at CDC: "One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data. The data are really, really timely. They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used... as early warning signal for flu activity"

Thomas Malone, professor at M.I.T.
: "I think we are just scratching the surface of what's possible with collective intelligence"

Eric Schmidt, GOOGLE's chief executive vows: "From a technological perspective, it is the beginning"

**************************************************
Google Uses Searches to Track Flu’s Spread
**************************************************

New York Times
By MIGUEL HELFT
Published: November 11, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO — There is a new common symptom of the flu, in addition to the usual aches, coughs, fevers and sore throats Turns out a lot of ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctor

That simple act, multiplied across millions of keyboards in homes around the country, has given rise to a new early warning system for fast-spreading flu outbreaks called Google Flu Trends

Tests of the new Web tool from Google. org, the company’s philanthropic unit, suggest that it may be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu a week to 10 days before they are reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

In early February, for example, the C.D.C. reported that the flu had recently spiked in the mid-Atlantic states.
But Google says its search data show a spike in queries about flu symptoms two weeks before that report came out Its new service at google. org/flutrends analyzes those searches as they come in, creating graphs and maps of the country that, ideally, will show where the flu is spreading

Some public health experts say the data could help accelerate the response of doctors, hospitals and public health officials to a nasty flu season, reducing the spread of the disease and, potentially, saving lives

“The earlier the warning, the earlier prevention and control measures can be put in place, and this could prevent cases of influenza,” said Lyn Finelli, lead for surveillance at the influenza division of the C.D.C.
Between 5 and 20 percent of the nation’s population contracts the flu each year, she said, leading to an average of roughly 36,000 deaths

For now the service covers only the United States, but Google is hoping to eventually use the same technique to help track influenza and other diseases worldwide

“From a technological perspective, it is the beginning,” said Eric E.
Schmidt, Google’s chief executive

The premise behind Google Flu Trends — what appears to be a fruitful marriage of mob behavior and medicine — has been validated by an unrelated study indicating that the data collected by Yahoo, Google’s main rival in Internet search, can also help with early detection of the flu

“In theory, we could use this stream of information to learn about other disease trends as well,” said Philip M.
Polgreen, assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Iowa and a co-author of the study based on Yahoo’s data

Still, some public health officials note that many health departments already use other approaches, like gathering data from visits to emergency rooms, to keep daily tabs on disease trends in their own communities

“We don’t have any evidence that this is more timely than our emergency room data,” said Farzad Mostashari, assistant commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

If Google provided health officials with details of the system’s workings so that it could be validated scientifically, the data could serve as an additional way to detect influenza that was free and might prove valuable, said Dr.
Mostashari, who is also chairman of the International Society for Disease Surveillance

A paper on the methodology behind Flu Trends is expected to be published in a future issue of the journal Nature

Researchers have long said that the material people publish on the Web amounts to a form of “collective intelligence” that can be used to spot trends and make predictions

But the data collected by search engines is particularly powerful, because the keywords and phrases that people type into search engines represent their most immediate intentions. People may search for “Kauai hotel” when they are planning a vacation and for “foreclosure” when they get in trouble with their mortgage.
Those queries express the world’s collective desires and needs, its wants and likes

Internal research at Yahoo suggests that increases in searches for certain terms can help forecast what technology products will be hits, for instance.
Yahoo itself has begun using search traffic to help it decide what material to feature on its site

Two years ago, Google began opening its search data trove through Google Trends, a tool that allows anyone to track the relative popularity of search terms. Google also offers more sophisticated search traffic tools that marketers can use to fine-tune advertising campaigns.
And internally it has tested the use of search data to reach conclusions about economic, marketing and entertainment trends

“Most forecasting is basically trend extrapolation,” said Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. “This works remarkably well, but tends to miss turning points, times when the data changes direction.
Our hope is that Google data might help with this problem”

Prabhakar Raghavan, who is in charge of Yahoo Labs and the company’s search strategy, also said search data could be valuable for forecasters and scientists, but concerns about privacy had generally stopped the company from sharing it with outside academics

Google Flu Trends gets around privacy pitfalls by relying only on aggregated data that cannot be traced back to individual searchers.
To develop the service, Google’s engineers devised a basket of keywords and phrases related to the flu, including thermometer, flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and many others

Google then dug into its database, extracted five years of data on those queries and mapped the data onto the C.D.C.’s reports of “influenza-like illness,” which the agency compiles based on data from labs, health care providers, death certificates and other sources. Google found an almost perfect correlation between its data and the C.D.C.
reports

“We know it matches very, very well in the way flu developed in the last year,” said Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google. org Dr. Finelli of the C.D.C. and Mr.
Brilliant both cautioned that the data needed to be monitored to ensure that the correlation with flu activity remained valid

Other people have tried to use information collected from Internet users for public health purposes A Web site called whoissick. org, for instance, invites people to report about what ails them and superimposes the results on a map.
But the site has received relatively little traffic, so its usefulness is limited

HealthMap, a project affiliated with Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, scours the Web for news articles, blog posts and electronic newsletters to create a map that tracks emerging infectious diseases around the world It is backed by Google. org, which counts the detection and prevention of diseases as one of its main philanthropic objectives

But Google Flu Trends appears to be the first public project that uses the powerful database of a search engine to track the emergence of a disease

“This seems like a really clever way of using data that is created unintentionally by the users of Google to see patterns in the world that would otherwise be invisible,” said Thomas Malone, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management.
“I think we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with collective intelligence”


Samuel Widmann, Head of Maps, Google Switzerland, speaks during a presentation of the new Google feature 'Google Sky' at the planetarium in Hamburg, northern Germany, August 22, 2007 Popular mapping service Google Earth will launch a new feature called Sky, a "virtual telescope" which enables users to float and zoom in on over 100 million individual stars and 200 million galaxies, that the search engine hopes will turn millions of Internet users into stargazers

**************************************************
Google search engine flags flu activity in U.
S
**************************************************

Maggie Fox, Reuters
Published: Tuesday, November 11, 2008

http://www. canada. com/vancouversun/news/story. html?id=c4fee5aa-1...

WASHINGTON (Reuters Life!) - Search engine giant Google launched a new tool Tuesday that will help U.S.
federal health experts track the annual flu epidemic

Google Flu Trends uses search terms that people put into the Web-based search engine to figure out where influenza is heating up, and notify the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time

"We've discovered that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity," Google said in a statement

"What this does is it takes Google search terms of influenza-like illness and influenza and it emulates a signal that tells us how much influenza activity there was," Dr.
Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at the CDC, said in a telephone interview

Studies indicate that between 35 and 40 percent of all visits to the Internet are begun by people looking for health information.
When people are sick, they tend to look up their symptoms

Google is keeping the search terms it uses private, but influenza-like illnesses include symptoms such as fever, muscle aches and cough.
Sneezing usually occurs with other viruses such as rhinoviruses

Currently, the CDC relies on centers that report on people coming to their doctors with flu-like symptoms, and lab tests that confirm whether a patient has influenza

But many people with flu never visit a doctor and most doctors treat based on symptoms, rarely giving a flu test

Either way, the CDC's surveillance data is about two weeks behind

The Google tool will track flu activity in near real time, the company said

EARLY WARNING

"One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data," Finelli said

"The data are really, really timely. They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used ... as early warning signal for flu activity"

Then the CDC can get the word out to hospitals, clinics and doctors offices so they can stock up on flu tests, antiviral drugs and antibiotics for people who get what are known as co-infections - bacterial infections that worsen a bout of flu

Two weeks warning also allows people to get vaccinated before flu reaches their community

Google is not charging for the service.
"They are giving it to the world for free," Finelli said

Google said it would keep individual user data confidential.
"Google Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week," the company said

"We rely on millions of search queries issued to Google over time, and the patterns we observe in the data are only meaningful across large populations of Google search users"

Influenza kills an estimated 36,000 people a year in the United States and 250,000-500,000 globally

Experts are keen to track flu activity in case of a pandemic - a global epidemic of a new and deadly strain of flu that could kill millions within a few months.