Swine Flu: Scope for Internet Disease Surveillance

Public Health relevant information is increasingly available at unlikely places. People and organizations supply valuable information about infectious diseases through various channels in a web accessible and searchable format. These range from official public health reporting to informal news coverage to personal experience. To capitalize on the dynamic nature of Web based information, researchers and surveillance experts have launched efforts to exploit this information for disease surveillance. Currently, there are three main types of internet disease surveillance methods being used: news media scanning, internet search term analysis, and social network analysis. The use of news media scanning is currently more in demand for the surveillance purposes than the others. However, internet search term analysis is being increasingly studied for this purpose and Google-Flu study is an example of one such effort. Despite the promise that use of Internet search data has shown for surveillance purposes, there are several limitations especially with regard to false positives, gaps in coverage, and noisy data sources. Also, Internet being new medium with only few years of data, the ability to do time series analysis is limited. This presentation would cover above mentioned aspects of the internet disease surveillance and provide specific case studies and proof-of-concepts to illustrate the theoretical paradigms mentioned above and invite suggestions to address the limitations of such methodologies. This presentation would also discuss topics related to the use of internet disease surveillance methods for outbreak investigation such as Swine Flu outbreak of 2009. We would like to present a retrospect analysis of the signals that may have helped surveillance efforts in early stages of the outbreak.