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VIRTUALISATION Google infects Australia with Google Flu Trends!
VIRTUALISATION Google infects Australia with Google Flu Trends! | Google infects Australia with Google Flu Trends! |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Thursday, 04 June 2009 | |
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The announcement of a Google Flu Trends service for Australia and New Zealand, complementing the services that already exist for the US and Mexico, come from Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm. An embargoed presentation yesterday featured two Google employees, Roni F. Zeiger, MD (of Google Health fame) and another 5 year Google employee whose name I only caught as Matt, to tell us about Australia and NZ coming into the Google Flu Trends fold. Dr Zeiger gave an introduction to the project as it started in the US, noting that “seasonal influenza is a well understood and major public health concern, affecting tens of millions of people every year”, and that half a million people died from regular influenza each year already. Google press release notes that: “Google Flu Trends, which launched in the US last year, resulted from our observation that certain flu-related search queries are common during flu season, and that searches for flu-related topics are closely correlated to the actual spread of flu. If we tally each day's flu-related search queries, we can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness. “While some traditional flu tracking systems may take days or weeks to collect and release data, Google search queries can be counted immediately. As a result, Google Flu Trends can be updated daily and may provide early detection of flu outbreaks.” Matt explained that Google worked with the CDC in the US and also tracked flu queries by Google users, with Zeiger noting that “the info that we’re studying from our search logs is an aggregation of many, many thousands of queries and which means two things – one is that our level of understanding of flu like activity is in the aggregate and the other is that none of this info can be tracked to any given individual.” We learned that most of Australia is covered by the new tool, save for the Northern Territory and Tasmania at this stage, and that there was nothing to announce about bringing Google Flu Trends to other countries at this time. In response to a question on how authorities could best benefit from the information Flu Trends provides, we learned that health officials could use this data to see flu affecting people days before any larger outbreaks, giving extra time for doctors and health workers to prepare. When it came to the initial swine flu outbreak, Google Flu Trends was able to reassure the US CDC (Center for Disease Control) that flu estimates were not skyrocketing at the time, thus I assume suggests any swine flu outbreak wasn’t quite as pandemic-like as first imagined. Continued on page 2, please read on! |
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