Swine Flu: ‘No worse than any other’
Yesterday Google launched an Australian version of its successful flu tracker that authorities believe reveals evidence of ‘Swine flu hype’.
IN HOPE of predicting and informing the severeness and scale of flu virus’ similar to the Swine Flu, Google announced yesterday an Australian version of Google Flu Trends in conjunction with health authorities’ data.
The Australian and New Zealand release follows the launch of the service Google have already deployed in Mexico and the United States.
Heath Kelly, the head of the Epidemiology Unit at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory (VIDRL) told Tech Wired that he believed the data revealed that the current Australian flu season appeared similar to previous years when compared with Google’s results.
“It appears as though the Swine Flu is no greater than any other flu season from previous years,” he said.
“It may be able to put out the swine flu hype.”
Mr Kelly also said that multiple sources of information gathered would help provide better understanding of the flu virus, and that Google Flu Trends provided one aspect of value that could identify trends in influenza activity.
“Having additional sources of data will be even more important than usual in the current influenza season, with the circulation of novel influenza A (H1N1), commonly known as swine flu, already established in Victoria,” he said.
“It’s providing interesting data because our surveillance says there is a high rise in the flu.”
With the help of the VIDRL, Google Australia hopes to inform the general public and authorities of any threats in an outbreak of the influenza virus.
The search giant found, by analysing certain anonymous search terms, that queries related to the flu tended to be very common during the flu season each year, as you’d expect.
“Upon building this model, we found that our historical Google search data correlated well with the VIDRL’s historical data in terms of flu activity in past years,” Google said in a statement.
“As the season unfolds this year, we’ll be watching to see how well our flu model performs compared with these existing surveillance systems.”
Google’s Flu Trend tracker has already shown how powerful its aggregated results can be when it predicted the Swine Flu outbreak in Mexico; but it was all too late.
It was only after inquiries were made to Google by public health officials until it lead them to create an experimental graph that showed an increase in flu-related search terms just before the Swine Flu spread.
By using its Geolocation knowledge, Google can then pinpoint locations in terms of which state those search queries were made from and display them on a map. This can then allow authorities to pinpoint locations for quarantine of future outbreaks.
The VIDRL’s Heath Kelly said he would be watching Google’s Flu Trend tracker to “…keep a keen eye on”.
