Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Google’ official blog update on the Flu Trends notes: “Google Flu Trends is updated daily and may provide early detection of flu outbreaks. We hope that this information complements existing flu surveillance efforts in Australia and New Zealand, and proves useful for individuals and public health responders.”
The blog entry ends with: “For those Kiwis and Aussies out there, avoid becoming part of our statistics and get a flu shot! And keep an eye on those graphs if you're curious to see how the flu season unfolds.”
Google’s press release explains how some of the data is collected in Australia, explaining: “To create Google Flu Trends for Australia, we worked with historical seasonal flu data from the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory (VIDRL), as well as our own anonymised, aggregated historical search data, to build a flu model for the state of Victoria.
“We then extrapolated this model to produce flu models at a national and state level for the rest of Australia, apart from Tasmania and Northern Territory for which we don't have a large enough volume of search queries to be accurate.
“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. As the season unfolds this year, we'll be watching to see how well our flu model performs compared with these existing surveillance systems.”
Heath Kelly, the head of the Epidemiology Unit at the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory said that: "Influenza experts recommend gathering information from multiple sources to best understand and monitor influenza activity, and Google Flu Trends provides a valuable and timely additional source of data that can help 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. The initial data from Google look promising, and researchers from VIDRL and the University of Queensland look forward to working with Google to further refine the monitoring of influenza in Australia."
Google adds that “Influenza is thought to generate hundreds of thousands of GP visits in Australia every year, and thousands of serious illnesses and sometimes even deaths. Early detection is critical to helping health officials respond more quickly and save lives.
“We hope this information complements existing flu surveillance efforts and proves useful for individuals and public health organisations.”
Some “Influenza fast facts”:
- In 2007, there were 2,623 deaths attributed to influenza and pneumonia. They were also the 13th leading cause of death in Australia for that year. (source: media release by Minister for Ageing Australia)
- In 2008, there were 9,129 cases of laboratory-confirmed influenza diagnosed and reported to the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System.
So, see Google Flu Trends online for yourself – and if you start oinking, get yourself to emergency immediately!
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
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