People say using the internet to look up your illness can be problematic.  But what if your search, combined with the searches of millions of others, could actually help detect disease?

Yesterday Google.org, led by 2007 TED Prize winner Larry Brilliant, announced a new web tool that uses search data as an early warning system for flu outbreaks: Goolge Flu Trends.  This tool will hopefully be able to detect regional outbreaks of the flu 10 days before they are reported by the CDC.

From their site…

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and discovered that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 11:12 am and is filed under TEDPrize Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.