11 Responses

1. Wow drudgereport thats some news source

2. Thomas Malone, professor at M.I.T.: “I think we are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with collective intelligence.”

   Boy is he right.

3. a flue is part of a chimney

4. #3 Feivel

   You are correct – this title actually refers to a different article, one about Google working with the government to track Santa Claus.

5. WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Search engine giant Google launched a new tool on Tuesday that will help U.S. federal health experts track the annual flu epidemic.

   Google Flu Trends uses search terms that people put into the Web-based search engine to figure out where influenza is heating up, and notify the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in real time.

   “We’ve discovered that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity,” Google said in a statement.

   “What this does is it takes Google search terms of influenza-like illness and influenza and it emulates a signal that tells us how much influenza activity there was,” Dr. Lyn Finelli, chief of influenza surveillance at the CDC, said in a telephone interview.

   Studies indicate that between 35 and 40 percent of all visits to the Internet are begun by people looking for health information. When people are sick, they tend to look up their symptoms.

   Google is keeping the search terms it uses private, but influenza-like illnesses include symptoms such as fever, muscle aches and cough. Sneezing usually occurs with other viruses such as rhinoviruses.

   Currently, the CDC relies on centers that report on people coming to their doctors with flu-like symptoms, and lab tests that confirm whether a patient has influenza.

   But many people with flu never visit a doctor and most doctors treat based on symptoms, rarely giving a flu test.

   Either way, the CDC’s surveillance data is about two weeks behind.

   The Google tool will track flu activity in near real time, the company said.

   EARLY WARNING

   “One thing we found last year when we validated this model is it tended to predict surveillance data,” Finelli said.

   “The data are really, really timely. They were able to tell us on a day-to-day basis the relative direction of flu activity for a given area. They were about a week ahead of us. They could be used … as early warning signal for flu activity.”

   Then the CDC can get the word out to hospitals, clinics and doctors offices so they can stock up on flu tests, antiviral drugs and antibiotics for people who get what are known as co-infections — bacterial infections that worsen a bout of flu.

   Two weeks warning also allows people to get vaccinated before flu reaches their community.

   Google is not charging for the service. “They are giving it to the world for free,” Finelli said.

   Google said it would keep individual user data confidential. “Google Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week,” the company said.

   “We rely on millions of search queries issued to Google over time, and the patterns we observe in the data are only meaningful across large populations of Google search users.”

   Influenza kills an estimated 36,000 people a year in the United States and 250,000-500,000 globally.

   Experts are keen to track flu activity in case of a pandemic — a global epidemic of a new and deadly strain of flu that could kill millions within a few months.

6. What a geoinishe zach

7. Shlach refuah shlima lchoily amecho… it should be a good shluach…

8. this seems like communism

9. What does the CDC plan to do after a Flu Epidemic Area has been identified? Dispatch Doctors and Nurses to vaccinate a known locality? Perhaps Google could allocate funding to help educate and inform (diet choices , weight reduction…) families living in or near infected areas. It appears Doctors, Hospitals, the CDC… profit from people being physically sick. Being physically sick is big business. Google is just joining the Band Wagon. What I don`t see more of is practical information about prevention. Google has the means to spend Millions of $$$$, using the latest and most sophisticated computer technology to identify an infected population. What about channeling money to the CDC for research for prevention of the infirmed population, so the people could recuperate instead of being statistical data for Google.

10. Merck is a huge drug company. They are one of the largest vaccine manufactures. For every vaccine that they market, they make a billion dollars in profit. (You read that right.) Coincidentally, the owner of Merck and the director of the CDC are brother and sister.

11. This is all part of the conspiracy to control us. They waant to proclaim a pandemic and then quarantine us and declare martial law. The flu shots are a big cause of spreading the flu around they do more harm than nothing at all. If someone lives a healthy lifestyle and eats properly, with good nutrition and exercise then he doesn’t have to be afraid of the flu. The drug companies and the government are trying to scare people into taking the flu shots and then when there is a pandemic caused by them, they will declare martial law and control us.