Webidemiology

Webidemiology is the method of using internet activity as an indicator of epidemic outbreaks. This is the topic of my final paper for the course and I must say that I honestly found it fascinating. The examples of webidemiology that I focused on were Google Flu Trends and Google Dengue Trends, which use recorded search queries and IP addresses to determine flu and dengue fever outbreaks, and HealthMap, which uses social media, news sites, blogs, and even an iPhone app to produce an interactive map that displays current disease outbreaks around the world.
The  most amazing thing about this technology is how accurate the data that it aggregates is. In each study that I researched there were graphs showing a very high correlation between data gathered by official sources (i.e. government health agencies) and data gathered by informal sources (i.e. Google Trends, HealthMap, Twitter). Also, when there were discrepancies, the reasons behind them were also really interesting. For example, towards the end of one study pertaining to dengue fever the informal estimates were significantly lower than the official estimates, which was attributed to the fact that fewer people discussed the disease on the internet because by that time it was old news.
Projects that use webidemiology have the potential to not only detect epidemics early but also to make their estimates available to the public very soon after the data is gathered. While I learned that government health agencies around the world can take between a week to a year to publish their results, some of the websites for these projects update their estimates once a day or even every hour. The main benefit of this is the potential to help health agencies better prepare for epidemics and thus reduce their spread through populations. This is especially important in developing countries, as without adequate preparation the treatment and vaccines necessary to combat these epidemics may not be readily available.