# 2456
When it comes to tracking where the flu is raging, the CDC's weekly surveillance report does a great job of telling us what the flu activity was roughly 2 weeks ago. It takes time for the data to be gathered and transmitted to the CDC, and then to have it tabulated and released.
Today, 11/11 the current data on the CDC website is for week 44 (October 26-November 1, 2008). While the information is quite detailed, it is derived from data that is two week old.
Google.org today has unveiled a site called Google Flu Trends, which will provide up-to-date real-time analysis of flu activity in all 50 states based on web searches initiated on `flu-related' terms.
According to early tests, Google Flu Trends has picked up on flu outbreaks 10 to 14 days before they show up on the CDC's tracking system.
This is just one of several new, innovative ways that the Internet is being used to track disease outbreaks.
There are also programs that scan newspaper items looking for key words and phrases, and programs that look for unusual buying patterns of things like medicines and disinfectants.
As Helen Branswell of the Canadian Press told us, in her article last May entitled SARS memories linger 5 years later:
It was November 2002 when people started getting sick with a severe respiratory illness in the province of Guangdong. It would take awhile for the nascent disease to ping on the global health radar.
Surging vinegar sales in China grabbed the attention of the folks who regularly scour the globe for what might be budding disease outbreaks, like those who work for the Canadian-led Global Public Health Intelligence Network.
"We were getting lots of rumours, like a lot of sales of vinegar," explains Dick Thompson, who was the spokesperson for the World Health Organization's communicable diseases section at the time.
"Vinegar in southern China is used as a disinfectant. And so if there's a run on vinegar, there'd be a suspicion that there was some kind of infectious disease or a widespread belief that there is an infectious disease outbreak. So at these meetings we'd been hearing this kind of drip, drip, drip come in about that."
And of course, the newshounds on the flu forums scour hundreds of foreign language newspapers each day, looking for anything that might indicate an outbreak of something unusual.
Nov 11, 2008 at 4:44pm Eastern by Danny Sullivan
Who’s Got The Flu? Google Flu Trends Reveal State-By-State Activity
Wondering if it’s just you or if others have the flu, too? Google’s announced a new tool that tells you. Google Flu Trends allows you to see flu activity across the United States.
How’s Google doing this? Is it now indexing actual human beings, in the way it does web pages? Nah. Turns out that when you’re sick with the flu, you search for that word and other flu-related topics. Google can tell which areas are seeing a spike in flu-related searching, and from that, trends can be plotted.
Consider this chart that compares actual flu activity to searches for flu-related terms, over time:
States with more flu activity are shown in darker blue. Click on any state to see the exact level:
