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But this year a new wrinkle has been added to the reporting: Google, the Internet search engine, has coughed up a map that will tell the degree of suffering, state by state. It does this by tracking Google searches. When people have the flu, they want information on flu symptoms, muscle aches, chest congestion and so on. And they want it now. So, they Google it.
Turns out that searches on those particular key words are a pretty good indicator of where people are suffering.
Outbreaks are already tracked by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, of course. But that data can take a week or two to compile from thousands of hospitals, doctor's offices, labs and the like all across the country. On Google Flu Trends -- www.google.org/flutrends -- searches are counted automatically every day.
People sometimes forget how deadly the flu can be: It kills 36,000 Americans every year. The earlier the warning, the better opportunity for health officials to do something about an outbreak.
How do they know this works? Google worked with the CDC, comparing five years of search data about sniffling, coughing, aching and fever with the CDC's flu stats, and they matched up pretty well.
As of yesterday, Google Flu Trends revealed that Texas has minimal flu activity while most other states, including Ohio, had low activity. Nine states, all east of the Mississippi, had moderate activity.
OK, not much going on. But with the map is a chart of past years' month-by-month trends, indicating the worst is yet to come -- with a peak typically between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Jeremy Ginsberg, the lead engineer who developed the Google site, said, "What's exciting about Flu Trends is that it lets anybody -- epidemiologists, health officials, moms with sick children -- learn about the current flu activity level in their own state based on data that's coming in."
At the very least, those who have the flu will be able to see that they are not suffering alone.
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