Using Web and social media for influenza surveillance

Courtney D Corley; Diane J Cook; Armin R Mikler; Karan P Singh

doi:10.1007/978-1-4419-5913-3_61

Using Web and social media for influenza surveillance

Adv Exp Med Biol. 2010:680:559-64. doi: 10.1007/978-1-4419-5913-3_61.

Authors

Courtney D Corley¹, Diane J Cook, Armin R Mikler, Karan P Singh

Affiliation

¹ Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA. court@pnl.gov

Abstract

Analysis of Google influenza-like-illness (ILI) search queries has shown a strongly correlated pattern with Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention seasonal ILI reporting data. Web and social media provide another resource to detect increases in ILI. This paper evaluates trends in blog posts that discuss influenza. Our key finding is that from 5th October 2008 to 31st January 2009, a high correlation exists between the frequency of posts, containing influenza keywords, per week and CDC influenza-like-illness surveillance data.

Publication types

Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

Blogging*
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, U.S.
Computational Biology
Disease Outbreaks
Humans
Influenza, Human / epidemiology*
Information Storage and Retrieval / methods
Internet*
Population Surveillance / methods*
United States / epidemiology