Lately I've been hearing from friends who want information on how to find locations for the H1N1 (swine) flu vaccine. Some have been unable to get the vaccine from their personal physicians and are seeking alternative sources.
I was surprised today to learn Google is now providing a service to help out.
The company has partnered with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to develop a high tech way to locate seasonal and H1N1 flu shot providers through the Internet at the following link: www.google.com/flushot
I tried it, and found it impressive. The tool leverages the Google Maps feature. When you go to the link it asks for your location and then drills down to show you the flu shot locations on a geographic map as well as in a printed listing with the site name, address, hours of operation and phone number.
Is it perfect? No. As with most new things, there are a few bugs. Google stressed today that the project has just started and they are still working hard to gather more information about flu shot clinics in many areas. In addition to HHS Google is working with the Centers for Disease Control, local and state health officials, and clinic providers. As best I can tell right now, the service seems to be for the US, and data from only about half of the states is included.
While I was learning about this service, I also discovered an international service Google is providing that is tracking the spread of the H1N1 flu worldwide.
If you go to http://www.google.org/flutrends/ you will find a world map that shows where current cases exist and the degree of severity.
How do they do this? Here's what Google says:
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Each week, millions of users around the world search for health information online. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Insights for Search. But can search query trends provide the basis for an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?
We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together. We compared our query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world. Our results have been published in the journal Nature.
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While neither of these tools is perfect, they are pretty exciting and show the power that can come from simply aggregating information that's coming from people like you and me. Who knows what kind of future tools may be developed from the work that's being done now to help with the flu outbreak. Are there any you'd like to see? If so, we'd love to hear from you.