PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are known to be strong predictors of various global events, such as the winners of elections. Now, a study has shown how Web 2.0 and search engines can help scientists track disease outbreaks and stop epidemics before they start.
Researchers from CHIP (Children’s Hospital Informatics Program) teamed up with Google to monitor search-engine data for signs of dengue, an infectious tropical disease that can lead to death. Unlike other disease data sources, such as hospital reports, search engines record disease-related searches in real time, allowing them to be a valuable tool for public health officials.
In 2008, Google developed a similar search tool for influenza, Google Flu Trends. Building off of this platform, Google Dengue Trends compares search data with historical outbreak data for specific locations to determine current disease activity as minimal, low, moderate, high or intense.
“By using search data, we’re tapping into a freely available, instant data set that can be gathered, analyzed and released much more quickly and at much lower effort and cost than through traditional national surveillance and reporting programs,” said John Brownstein, director of the Computational Epidemiology Group in CHIP and head of the research team, said in a statement. “The kind of information the tool provides can help direct public health officials target interventions aimed at mosquito control and disease prevention, such as education campaigns, as early as possible.”
The program considers the fact that not all searches about dengue mean the disease is present. Because dengue is endemic to areas in Asia, Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, a disease-related search in, for example, England would not likely correspond with an outbreak.
“Dengue affects large numbers of people,” Brownstein explained, “but because it is endemic in many countries, it is not a disease where search data would be affected by panic-induced searching or a lot of ‘noise.’”
For the initial study, researchers analyzed data from Bolivia, Brazil, India, Indonesia and Singapore. Not only do these countries have significant endemic dengue transmission, but they also have widespread Internet usage and substantial historical data about outbreaks. Their findings were published in the journal “PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.”
“This information can act as a supplement to traditional surveillance and reporting systems and give local authorities a leg up on an outbreak,” Brownstein said.
These results are just another example of how social media and search engines are bringing accurate data more quickly than traditional sources—about everything from politics and public health to customer interest and satisfaction.
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