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Google Can Predict the Flu
An anonymous reader mentions Google Flu Trends, a newly unveiled initiative of Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm. The claim is that this Web service, which aggregates search data to track outbreaks of influenza, can spot disease trends up to 2 weeks before Centers for Disease Control data can. The NYTimes writeup begins: "What if Google knew before anyone else that a fast-spreading flu outbreak was putting you at heightened risk of getting sick? And what if it could alert you, your doctor and your local public health officials before the muscle aches and chills kicked in? That, in essence, is the promise of Google Flu Trends, a new Web tool ... unveiled on Tuesday, right at the start of flu season in the US. Google Flu Trends is based on the simple idea that people who are feeling sick will tend to turn to the Web for information, typing things like 'flu symptoms; or 'muscle aches' into Google. The service tracks such queries and charts their ebb and flow, broken down by regions and states."
Thats a seriously great idea ...
It totally sidesteps the problem of early symptoms not typically getting people to the doctor where it can potentially be reported/tracked.
There's probably a lot of trends that can be detected the same way beyond just disease.
Buy stock in companies that sell treatments for Beri-Beri, Trench Foot, and Jungle Rot, and then have your botnet look them on on google.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
In the future, Google will be able to record your eating habits and predict when you are going to poop.
This, of course, won't work on female users since we all know that girls don't poop.
on antivirus software.
What if people start searching for "impeach Obama" or "repeal PATRIOT Act" or terms like "ELF" or "NRA" ? Will Google start reporting that to the government and selling that type of info to the media ? Will they sell the IPs ?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
If Madagascar detects anyone googling "flu" they'll close their ports.
How about Google Ebola, or maybe Google Gangrene? Google Dirty Bomb?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Do to the /. effect thousands of /.ers started googling flu symptoms causing the predictor to indicate a flu outbreak.
Thousands of hypochondriacs responded by checking themselves into hospitals complaining about flu-like symptoms.
If you've received a flu shot in the past 6 years the only thing you got was a chance at a bad immune reaction and a concoction of mercury, detergent and some other nasty compounds.
That's blatantly untrue. The flu strain predictions have been fairly good in the last few years, with the exception of 2003-2004 when it was only marginally protective for one of the more common strains. Even that year, it was largely protective for most strains. Get your damn flu shot and protect the rest of us. For reference:
wikipedia
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Umm...
You're TOTALLY wrong. WHO-recommended flu vaccines are very effective. See here for an example: http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/ccdr-rmtc/06vol32/acs-07/index.html
And: "...the only thing you got was a chance at a bad immune reaction and a concoction of mercury, detergent and some other nasty compounds..." is just a stock anti-vaccination quackery.
1. Invest in Tamiflu (the leading medication to treat flu symptoms)
2. Organize a massive effort to do web searches for "flu symptoms"
3. Wait for Google to sound the flu alarm
4. Profit!
or else!
Yeah, but a sick person's coworkers will google it because people are idle sheep, and googling is a no-brainer way to assuage your worry with cheap info-trickle.
I mean, it's still useless - if you know whether it's winter, and whether any of your coworkers have flu, you can already do better than the almighty google. I think however, that it probably mostly does correlate with flu incidences.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
My concern here would be the potential to cause a public panic. I recall a google bot malfunctioning once before. To wit: Google's automated search engine's crawlers brought a news story from December 10, 2002 that detailed United Airline's file for bankruptcy to the top of its listing and confused a large amount of UAL shareholders, causing them to sell their shares and drop the value of UAL significantly. (Reference: http://www.googlechromeboard.com/post193.html)
Let's say their automated data mining for flu information goes wrong. The google public page erroneously reports this data. The CDC (and other health organizations) now have to respond to "Well, Google says this..". Hopefully, large groups of people would critically think over information they read and not panic. However, the previous example shows differently.
Compounding this is the tone of the page. Google's arrogant statement that "...Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems" I infer to mean "Don't trust those slow-pokes at the CDC; trust us!" If GOOG really wanted to help the CDC, offer free colo, bandwidth and security for their public facing servers so they can broadcast to the public.
"It's one thing to talk about the poetry of machines. Quite another to listen to it for yourself."
As a capitalist, and an incubator, I've spent tens of thousands of dollars (per project) on market analyses. For me, finding if a particular good or service, even a niche or very specific on, is desired in a given area is expensive. It's often the MOST expensive thing I do before starting a business.
I've always harbored the idea that Google's grasp of data, even just raw data, is their most important resource. As they make this information available, the market will prosper. I've been able to use Google Trends (national, not local) to profit from the so-called "long-tail" and enter a business market I might otherwise not have.
When Google starts making trend data available based on region, it will be a huge boon for guys like me -- the risk takers. I'd love to know if a certain term is growing in popularity in given regions, or even in given regions at certain times (say "Where can I get vegan food?" in Chicago after 10pm but before 4am). I'd love to know if it's from a desktop or mobile, or even a Mac versus PC. By digging deeper into a customer-base's desire, Google trending can offer me a profitable business, but it can also offer the customer base more competition (or even a product that isn't readily available in their market).
The flu trending is just an eyewash to push Google's strength in raw data retention over time. That's their reason for doing it. Will it help people? Certainly. But to those anti-capitalists, this is exactly where capitalism reaches those in need, but still can provide a profit for the charitable person or company.
Okay, you have a point, and I'm not saying that the Google flu-tracker will work, but it has a better chance than voluntary reporting will create. Additionally, if they can match this against voluntary reporting, or flu symptom reports by volume in clinics and hospitals etc. Then more valid data can be produced.
Yes, I know there may be issues with getting numbers from clinics and such, and there damned well should be. On the other hand, the CDC gets numbers from somewhere and those numbers are publicized. They could be used to verify accuracy of the prediction mechanism, and over time create an accurate-ish predictor of danger from the flu.
No matter how shaky the data is to start with, once it is verified it will become possible to indicate with some level of accuracy when there is a risk in your area or anyone's area.
Anomalous data such as that which would be derived from tracking searches for Zombie symptoms and defense methods can more or less be safely ignored as can other data that won't fit a pattern of pandemic infection. However, it should be noted that searches for something like snakebite, itchy bumps, and various other symptoms could be used to alert the CDC that in a given area there is indication that often misdiagnosed maladies, or rather the symptoms of them, are being searched for at a rate that is above the quiescent level of such searches.
If all the hits for malaria in a given area are from the IP range of a medical school, that can be ignored. You see, it is the quality of the validation data that makes the search data worth using.
So, IMO, this has a chance of being half useful.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
A very long time. How on earth is this "interesting?" Is crazed paranoia on /. really the most interesting thing you've seen all day? I think some of the mods need to get out more.
The flu can mutate, and does; and once in a while it becomes a pandemic that kills percentages in whole integer digits (1% of the population is still a significant number of deaths).
But regardless I can tell you any pandemic or sickness will probably sweep through London first. Very few, if any, people, from your low class to your high class, actually cover their mouth when they cough. Add to that close proximity of people in public places (crowded tube, buses, walkways) and the international visitors streaming through London's 3 major international airports every day and you have a recipe for biological disaster.
You obviously haven't heard much about The 1918 Flu Pandemic
Real libertarians would tell you to start your own search engine that doesn't save information in order to compete with Google in a fair unregulated market, so that the competition forces Google to change.
I don't preview or spellcheck.
5-10 years ago I had a somewhat similar idea:
We all know that animals act odd, hours or days before things like earthquakes. The morning before a 6.8 quake in Washington State in 2001, my neighbors dog that normally will do anything to force it's way out of the front door and run for hours when the door is opened the slightest bit, wouldn't even get close to the door when the neighbor opened it. By itself, 1 animal acting weird means nothing, but a large group of animals over a localized area acting weird at the same time would point to something about to happen. The problem is that it is always after the "catastrophe" that people say, "You know sparky was acting odd this morning". If there was an online database that you could quickly go to and report that at your address your pet is acting weird at this moment, you might be able to predict the event by looking for groups of "odd acting" pets. I know it seems like a weird & far fetched idea, but tell me why it wouldn't work.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
If you've received a flu shot in the past 6 years the only thing you got was a chance at a bad immune reaction and a concoction of mercury, detergent and some other nasty compounds.
Thimerosal (mercury) is only used in multi-dose vials. Although these are legal in the US, they are in practice not used here. The chances you received any thimerosal in your flu shot if you got in the US is almost nil.
I do agree with the OP that two years of the last decade the WHO predicted which strains would be dominant in the US incorrectly and thus the shot didn't immunize the recipient properly against the strains they would actually face.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Seriously, everyone in the Slashdot crowd needs to read Wired. It is a fantastic magazine, which wrote about this like two months ago.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Yes, but not without violating the privacy of the users of google. We don't ask for their personal information from the clinic because it's a privacy violation, but we apparently have no moral objections to using their browser histories to get pretty much the same data.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It's a flugle bomb!
At least over the last two weeks I've noticed a sudden increase in people who either out sick, or are running around the office with suspicious coughs, sniffles, etc. Of course, bring up the possibility of the flu and you are met with adamant denial- "it must just be allergies," "nah, it's way too early for flu season".
So, it was no big surprise to see that the graphs for several midsouth states (Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana) have jumped recently, while other parts of the country (and the US overall) remain fairly level.
You're TOTALLY wrong. WHO-recommended flu vaccines are very effective
You're correct, for the majority. There are those of us though who end up having immune system reactions for a good month to 6 weeks following a flu shot every single time.
I specifically do NOT get a flu shot for this reason, but if one does not have this kind of reaction then you're exactly correct. I may not be a carrier with the vaccine but i cannot risk being guaranteed under the weather for almost 10% of the year as opposed to the risk of possibly contracting the flu during the winter myself.
The following is more of a way the hell out there probability:
There is the other side of the coin that we have yet to get a long term enough sample set to verify. Imagine a world where humanity has been vaccinating for a few generations and suddenly due to one event or another, the supply of vaccines is no longer available.
I hope those practice runs on the vaccines is enough to keep our immune systems able to cope. The chances of vaccination having a negative effect on us being naturally able to cope with new strains is a non-zero to keep an eye on if nothing else. Not saying OMG FLU SHOTS EVIL EACH INNOCULATION KILLS A KITTEN or anything, but theres a lot of outliers like this that many people avoid considering. Personally i think it has a lot to do with the years of grooming patients to accept a doctor as god as opposed to another human, with all the possible error conditions that applies, who happens to know a shitload about medicine and biology.
Just an aside.
How the hell does WHO predict Flu strains for immunization? I am honestly ignorant and would like to know.
I'm too lazy to drudge up some facts for this but the only people benefiting from flu vaccines are the sick, elderly, and those with lowered immune responses. If you are healthy it's minimally effective and it isn't entirely safe for young children.
I prefer using strategies which don't put extra evolutionary pressures on viruses: vaccinating those at high risk of exposure or death from exposure, and letting the adaptive immune response work for everyone else.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
This is fascinating, but it does make me wonder what else they could be predicting.
For example, if they're correlating searches from at-work employees, I bet they could turn up all manner of interesting things - predicting layoffs or other adverse business conditions, see who HR is googling (are they interviewing Google employees?).
Or keeping tabs on start-ups that are doing research into areas that Google is looking to make acquisitions. (Imagine when you're trying to sell your company to Google, they pull your employees' search history to see how long you've really been working on your flux capacitor.)
This reminds me of the fellow that used google records for his area to prove in court the "Community Standards" relating to obscenity were not as conservative as one would think.
So long as it's anonymous and stays that way(isn't that always the rub), I'm all for google using their info like this.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
From the Google.org announcement:
So either you're wrong, or you're right, and some yet undiscovered mechanism is allowing Google's search results to have such a consistently strong correlation that allows it to be predictive. Either way, it seems to work, and seems useful.
Yes, but during the most recent Flu Pandemic (1968-1969), deaths from the flu were below average in the U.S..
For all intents and purposes the 1918 Flu Pandemic occurred before the advent of modern medicine. Penicillin wasn't discovered until 1928. The developments that followed the discovery of penicillin drastically reduced the fatality of the flu.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
everyone knows it starts in arnette, tx.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
He's both wrong and right. He started out wrong saying most people won't hit google for the information. He finished right by describing what most slashdotters would do. Subtle but key difference.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
While the healthy won't die or have any serious consequences, they can still pass it on the others, who may be a greater risk.
....Penicillin is an anti-biotic. Not going to do a thing against the flu. About the only development that has helped us fight the flu is vaccination. And maybe a small bit of improvement in personal hygiene.
Except Google says they anonymize after 9 months, so this should be impossible, unless Google is lying.
I posted models of it almost three years ago.
http://www.realmeme.com/Main/dailymeme/2005/Aug/coughcoldDejanews.png
Web searches are co-incidental indicators.
Want to see something that Google hasn't shown you?
http://www.realmeme.com/roller/page/realmeme/?entry=sars_versus_avian_flu_meme
It's quite likely that the Internet retains knowledge and alters its behavior over time. Compare the group reaction time between the SARS and avian flu viruses.
"That, in essence, is the promise of Google Flu Trends, a new Web tool... unveiled on Tuesday, right at the start of flu season in the US. Google Flu Trends is based on the simple idea that people who are feeling sick will tend to turn to the Web for information, typing things like 'flu symptoms; or 'muscle aches' into Google. The service tracks such queries and charts their ebb and flow, broken down by regions and states.""
Hmmm. *types in Google "Dick falling off"*
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Evidently a reference to The Stand.
Everybody knows influenza symptoms and we are bombarded with cold and flu remedies on TV. I cannot imagine that anyone will do searches on that.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Kind of off topic, but that is why it amazes me that most people are getting chicken pox vaccines for their kids. The yearly death rate for chicken pox was ~140. Way less than the flu. 50% of the deaths were in the 5% of the population that made it into adulthood without getting chicken pox. So, now it is standard procedure to give just about every kid a chicken pox vaccine that does not give them life long immunity the way getting sick would, but instead leaves them at best 20 times more likely to die from the disease by delaying infection into adulthood, or putting them on a life long regiment of booster shots.
Don't forget that a researcher recently (2007)discovered that flu viruses propagate best at 41F and low humidity. As someone on /. commented wrt this discovery, in case of a flu epidemic, he is going to spend as much time in heated and humidified environments.
Actually we still use leeches. They are very useful for reattaching tiny blood vessels by preventing clotting. Link
You missed one. Google does advertising very well. Considering, as far as I can tell, that's the only concrete reason for their existence, I'd say it's actually the most important one. Everything else is gravy.
risk in Oregon: low
Being sick is not fun, stay home if you are sick!
Now... Time to play some more left4dead.
my associative arrays can kick your hash - TCL
And vaccinating the healthy just mutates the virus to a different strain faster ensuring that the old/sick will die since the shots against it are now useless.
Here is the problem: Most people are brainwashed by propaganda over the last several decades. Sad but true.
Try this primer on vaccines in general
More info on flu.
Liberty.
My workplace (in the US) offers flu shots and is quite clear about thimerosal being in the vaccine. They have an extra stash on the side for pregnant women that are explicitely non-thimerosal.
...I'm just getting over the flu now. Sucks to be an early adopter.
I was actually a little skeptical, until I saw that my state is one of the 4 they highlighted, despite being somewhere you wouldn't expect to find a lot of "wintertime illnesses"
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
While the healthy won't die or have any serious consequences, they can still pass it on the others, who may be a greater risk.
That's why I said those at risk should be the ones who are vaccinated, otherwise, like I said before, you are putting unnecessary pressures on the virus to mutate by blanket vaccinations. As far as I know the seroprevalence of influenza isn't as problematic as other diseases and virii, so why innoculate the healthy?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
What a ridiculous statement. Yes, viruses and bacteria mutate, but a vaccine is a good way of fighting it. Small pox didn't suddenly get worse when everyone got vaccinated, on the contrary, it was pretty much eradicated, save for lab samples. Vaccines have made a number of diseases practically unknown to the modern world thanks to their incredible effectiveness (polio anyone?), and here you are spreading completely wrong information about vaccination.
A realistic assessment of the flu vaccine can pretty easily show its value- it's around 60-70% effective, according to the sheet they gave me when I got vaccinated this year. If a majority of the people you come in contact with are vaccinated, it clearly reduces the probability of infection. This becomes especially important if you plan to visit anyone in a nursing home or hospital, in terms of protecting them as well as yourself from the flu.
So stop trying to out-think the logic of vaccination just to be different and go get vaccinated. It won't hurt you, it doesn't cause autism, and you won't turn into a zombie (and even if you do, brains may just be pretty tasty)
Antibiotics will not help against the flu virus. However, it will help against the secondary bacterial pneumonias that can occur and are a cause of significant morbidity/mortality.
Additionally, there are flu specific pharmacotherapies available. For example M2 channel blockers (amantadine, ramantadine) and neuraminidase inhibitors (oseltamivir and zanamivir) can help with treating the flu.
And last but not least -- chicken soup :)
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
You claim that people have been "brainwashed by propaganda" and criticize wikipedia then link to some random anti-vaccine site written by a bunch of people who wouldn't know the scientific method if it beat them over the head multiple times (large sample size of beatings necessary). This website has the audacity to suggest that there is a link between vaccines and AIDS, and the hilarious statement that there are no control group studies performed on vaccines. Every damn vaccine on the market has been tested in control group studies, a simple google search will turn up thousands of them. How can anyone take such an absurd website seriously?
How about all the people who haven't gotten smallpox? How about the people who haven't been crippled from polio? Or maybe the people who have avoided tetanus, measles, mumps, and rubella?
Oh right, you forgot about all of those people, even though that pretty much describes everybody.
So, if people start relying on google warnings, two things will result: Increased searches for "flu symptoms" after a google warning (increasing the size and scope of a warning), and almost no searches for "flu symptoms" when no warnings are issued (reducing the frequency of the warnings).
You really should watch the video I linked in the other post since it addresses these directly.
Liberty.
This sort of thing has been floated around for a while under the banner of 'syndromic surveilance'. I spent most of the last three years working on a research project that involved gathering data on water quality and developing statistical software to find subtle indications of contamination. The intent was always to extend the approach to syndromic data, incorporating things like over-the-counter medicine sales, ER visits, and so forth.
Unfortunately, it turns out that none of us on the team knew enough about statistics to manage a fantasy football league. I'm now happily self-employed doing stuff absolutely unrelated to statistics. I think some of my hair has grown back, and I hardly even cringe when someone says 'generalized least squares'.
If you're interested, though, here is a paper from the CDC on the subject. I'm pretty sure they have a better idea what they're talking about. Or at any rate, they've got nicer graphics.
It is probably true that the vaccine does not gives out life long immunity. However, it seems that the life long immunity of getting sick is also a myth. I know two people who have had the chicken pox twice (could this be a statistical blip ?). In both cases, vaccine or disease, the same mechanisms are probably at play, and some immune systems can forget the strain after a sufficiently long time.
Another issue for the adult is shingles. Wouldn't it be better to live on a life long regiment of booster shots, as you said, if this can prevent this very unpleasant condition ? However, the vaccine is made of living weakened virus, so could these weakened virus also cause shingles in some cases ?
You can find a lot of information on the internet about this, but as a lot of people said on this topic, reliable information (and serious scientific studies) are harder to come by.
Are you sure? [mp3]. 146 million flu shots were made for the 08-09 flu season. Of those, 100 million of those contain a full dose of mercury. That's 250 times the EPA safety limit. It's been shown that adults who regularly get the flu shot have a 10 fold increased chance of Alzheimer's. Educate yourself.
Be relentless!
I'm not commenting on who of the two is the lesser evil. If you want to know my political views, read my other posts or ask me. I claim to be indifferent to race; I'm a white male in a white culture and an independent observer is a better judge of whether my behavior matches my thoughts, so take it with a grain of salt, but at the same time compare it to people who explicitly say they prefer one race over another in some way.
Sorry for the self-reply. I just don't want people to be unclear about whether I'm only joking or also bringing out implicit racial slurs. I'm only joking :)
If you are "a little ill for a few days" then you don't have the flu. It kills many more people than you think.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Some animals seem to have "Extra Sensory Perception" (the cat Oscar, for example, seems to be able to predict the impending death of terminally ill patients (Oscar_(cat))), although I am more inclined to the opinion that these animals are paying attention to (for them) quite obvious things which we just have not identified yet.
Bzzzzt! Wrong!
The study you are quoting found a statistically significant decrease in mortality in vaccinated persons. So vaccines work.
However, it also found that some methods of assessing vaccine efficacy might be biased. But all vaccines must undergo double-blind trials which are NOT susceptible for biased selection.
Ok, smallpox vaccines are crappy.
But we managed to eradicate smallpox with these vaccines. Same for polio.
Here is the page for for Dr.Jim Berkland, director of the Syzygy project. He uses collated "odd animal" stats, spikes in pets lost and found postings (dogs and cats seem to either hide and cower or go nuts and run away before quakes), along with other stuff like tracking tidal influences and whatnot for earthquake predictions.
Influenza (the flu), originates in China pretty much every year. Different strains of RNA viruses arise (mutations in antigens, the process is called antigenic drift), in pigs. These are different enough to be able to get past the immune system (which is resistant to last year's strain, but unable to recognize recombined (new) antigens).
Pigs share a common receptor with people which is hijacked by these RNA viruses; this allows the virus to jump from pigs to humans. (Aside: they also share a different receptor with birds, which is why we're so paranoid about avian influenza: it could jump to pigs, mutate to our receptor, and then jump to humans.)
Every year you'll have dozens of different strains of influenza arising in pigs; only and handful of these use the common receptor and are able to jump to people. From there, only a handful of these are spread (through migration) to other parts of the world. IIRC, the flu spreads west with the climate, eventually encountering a city where it's able to hitch a ride to America (and the rest of the world) on a boat or an airplane.
WHO relies on being able to look at previous strains which reached epidemic and pandemic proportions, and on being able to artificially recombine antigens to create this years major strains. Sometimes they miss a few critical ones (2003-2004), but they're remarkably good about predicting which strains will mutate.
Basically, there are only a few different antigens, and we rely on creating the same new set that nature will create (there's a finite number of viable recombinant strains, after all). I doubt they look at pigs in China; there's simply too many in areas that are too remote.
If there's an epidemiologist reading this, he can probably give you a more detailed answer.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
If you are "a little ill for a few days" then you don't have the flu. It kills many more people than you think.
Wow, how incredibly ignorant! Aside from some very rare strains, Influenza typically only kills the infirm. Thus the very young, very old, and very sick are the only ones actually at risk of death from the flu.
There is room for the flu to become more deadly, but on the other hand, we've been evolving along with it, so while it is almost certainly becoming more dangerous to us, our immune systems are getting more dangerous to it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, but not without violating the privacy of the users of google. We don't ask for their personal information from the clinic because it's a privacy violation, but we apparently have no moral objections to using their browser histories to get pretty much the same data.
Could you please explain the privacy risk in google recording that someone has made a search for information on the flu?
Could you also quote the specific text to which you are replying next time, so that we the membership of slashdot can determine the most relevant objection to your ridiculous arguments?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's great! Google strikes again... We can now "predict" a flu season when it is already happening. The timing of a flu season is more or less regular for a particular place (one of the mysteries of flu) and the big problem is not to predict when it will happen, but what will be the strain of choice for this year. This is the effort of CDC/WHO and it is a tricky problem because the flu virus mutates a lot (hence the need to be vaccinated every year). The mutation sometimes is such that an avian and a human virus combine to produce a new human virus. That's when bad things happen (predicted vaccines fail, 1918 pandemic, etc.). Google's idea is at best very interesting as a tool for monitoring the spread of flu amongst people with access to internet, but I fail to see its predictive power in general.
Does google flutrend predicts H1N1 as well?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Thimerosal (mercury) is only used in multi-dose vials. Although these are legal in the US, they are in practice not used here. The chances you received any thimerosal in your flu shot if you got in the US is almost nil.
No, you are almost guaranteed to get a shot with thimerosal because most flu shots are multi-dose. Since they guess as to the strain that will be prevalent, they generally make shots that protect against several strains at once.
In addition to mercury, these shots also have aluminum and formaldehyde. Mercury and Aluminum are neurological poisons-they accumulate in the brain. Formaldehyde is a known carcinogen and is used to embalm the dead. There is no safe level of formaldehyde established for injection into a living organism.
I do agree with the OP that two years of the last decade the WHO predicted which strains would be dominant in the US incorrectly and thus the shot didn't immunize the recipient properly against the strains they would actually face.
Since I have never had the flu (in the past 10 years anyway) I fail to see why I should get an injection. If you are susceptible or if it would be hazardous to get the flu, then by all means if you choose to do it then get the shot. But injecting a perfectly healthy person with chemicals known to cause problems simply doesn't make any sense. My body, my choice as to what goes into it.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
For starters, most people's first reaction to getting sick isn't to google their symptoms.
That's the first thing I do when I get sick. What are you going to do at the drug store if you don't know if you have a cold, the flu, allergies, or something else? Waste your money on drugs that don't do anything because you bought the wrong stuff? No, google is your friend.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
They look at what strains were on the rise at the end of the last season. Their success rate is low because of the long lag time. The long lag time is needed because it takes a long time to prepare the vaccine. If we could speed up the vaccine preparation process it would be much better.
During the summer in the northern hemisphere, when it is winter in the southern hemisphere, they have a pretty good idea of what strains we will see because it is the flu season in places like Australia. The vaccine is created with weakened versions of the most common flu strains in countries from the southern hemisphere.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
I'm no expert, but it was something like a particular flu season's flue hit elsewhere in the world first, or first inklings of it happen a few months ahead of the big wave. By keeping close watch on new and early flu cases around the world, they can establish a trend on which ones are going to spread widely.
or something like that, and as mentioned elsewhere in the discussion, they sometimes get it wrong.
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
How the hell does WHO predict Flu strains for immunization? I am honestly ignorant and would like to know.
No magic, really.
Basically, they pick the dominant strain that is circulating at the time that they have to make a recommendation to the vaccine producers.
The vaccine strain has to be picked ~6 months before it is needed (it takes that long to grow it up in eggs in sufficient quantity). Typically, that is right at the peak of flu season for the other hemisphere (north/south).
The selection is based on the RNA sequence for the virus, and on antigenic tests (antibodies to the strain, grown up in ferrets usually).
The selection is made much earlier than the CDC/WHO would like, but the long lead time for vaccines means you have to do it. So the track record for picking vaccine strains the last few years is pretty remarkable.
The only 'wrong' strain that got picked was the H3N2 strain in 2003. Everyone knew which strain to pick, but they couldn't make it grow in eggs. So they picked another one that did grow (better than nothing) and a lot of people died. Since then, there has been a lot more interest in getting a cell-based vaccine pushed through the FDA here in the US...
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
Polio had a MUCH lower transmission rate was much MUCH slower to mutate or pass between people. The vaccine killed all varieties of polio not 60%. Polio was also stalled by stopping drinking water with shit in it. People with polio didn't go to work to spread it. Yes country wide vaccinations may severely stall one strain of the flu but that will just give other strains a chance to spread. Oh and i'm not doing it just to be different I had no idea there were mandatory vaccinations in the US...there aren't in most countries.
with the exception of 2003-2004 when it was only marginally protective for one of the more common strains
It goes even further than this. The CDC and WHO knew which strain to pick that year. And it didn't grow in eggs, so it couldn't be picked.
It is very frustrating to know what you want, not be able to get it, and then watch a bunch of people die because of it...
Get your damn flu shot and protect the rest of us.
Amen! Flu is one of the biggest disease causes of morbidity and mortality on a yearly basis. And it is vaccine preventable. Why wouldn't you get a flu shot? You doctor will tell you if you have any risk factors that would prevent you from getting one.
Go get vaccinated, people.
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
It's the only one, though; the vaccine was extraordinarily effective, the vaccine was not prepared from the same virus, and probably most importantly, there was (and is) no non-human reservoir for the disease.
Flu vaccine is notoriously ineffective and there are plenty of non-human reservoirs.
Flu vaccine won't cause autism and won't turn you into a zombie (that's what Nyquil is for), but IME there's a strong positive correlation between getting the flu vaccine and getting the flu. I'll pass.
Uh, yeah. That's because adults who regularly get the flu shot tend to be a lot older than average.
This is off topic, but thank you for using all "intents" and purposes correctly. I have seen an abundance of grammatical errors lately. I see no reason why Google won't be able to market this data. I am curious as to whether their data is better in countries w/o public healthcare.
You hate your job? There's a support group for that. It's called "everybody" and they meet at the bar. -Drew Carey.
The polio vaccine was actually responsible for causing polio outbreaks. It also infected people with sv40 and other harmful viruses.
Liberty.
I'm sorry, but this video is a stock anti-vaccination agitprop. It's stupid beyond belief.
All vaccines are controlled by double-blind trials. And they show that vaccines WORK. That's a FACT, you have to live with it.
Polio had been stopped ONLY because of vaccines. Here's a bit of statistics for you:
Number of polio incidents in Moscow in 1959: 9471
Number of polio incidents in Moscow in 1961: 23
Guess what made this difference?
Of course, vaccines are not TOTALLY safe, especially they were not safe 50 years ago. But by now our vaccine manufacturing methods have improved greatly.
I would have thought that with the stress of the holidays and people traveling all over, that there'd be a peak around Christmas/New Years. But it actually seems to dip in that period. I wonder what to make of that.
A nearly identical study from Yahoo!, Harvard, and the University of Iowa was published on October 27:
Using Internet Searches for Influenza Surveillance
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/593098
Except Google says they anonymize after 9 months, so this should be impossible, unless Google is lying.
Google's 'anonymization' is not terribly effective. They only zero out the last 8-bits of the ip address. Any decent data forensics group should be able to piece together enough information from multiple data points to 're-nonymize' the info. Not feasible for a small-stakes civil matter, but anything larger (say a multi-million dollar divorce) it would probably be worth the effort.
Plus, there is the whole matter of the 9 months, depending on the specific case, that's plenty of time to go digging for incriminating information.
You're sorry but you didn't watch it right?
It's ok, I'm done discussing this. People who've never studied the subject or looked at any of the actual studies come out on slashdot like they are the pre eminent authorities.
For anybody not as hard headed as the guy I'm responding to, here is the section on polio, since he brings it up. If you watch it and find your preconceptions melting away, think to yourself about why you ever had them in the first place.
Vaccination is a medical procedure, and as such a thorough risk assessment needs to be undertaken to evaluate it's need. The beliefs that it is very effective and carries no risk are in direct opposition of carrying out a proper risk vs reward evaluation.
Liberty.
Real libertarians would tell you to start your own search engine that doesn't save information in order to compete with Google in a fair unregulated market, so that the competition forces Google to change.
No, that's more proto-libertarian thinking. Real libertarians understand barriers to entry and scope of service. Besides, that is essentially the same thing as saying "don't use google" - creating competition for google is not an answer that helps google's business, so what are they going to do about it?
Chicken pox may not kill as many people, but it is extremely unpleasant if you have it during your teenage years or in adulthood. (Speaking from personal experience.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I watched it. It's S_T_U_P_I_D. It's full of lies.
It's a black hole of stupidity. It's idiocy. It would have made doctor Goebels proud.
It's cretinism and anybody who believed it is an idiot.
Polio is like a sore throat, yeh sure. I wish SHE got polio. Vaccine-associated polio incidence is about 1 case for every 10 _millions_ of vaccinations. A wild polio strain has about 1 in 1000 incidence rate. That's one _thousand_ times more.
So now maybe each other year one child in the US gets vaccine-associated polio with serious permanent effects.
Back in 50-s there were 50000 cases in New York _alone_. And 2% of people with permanent disabilities translates to 1000 people each year.
And don't get me started on her LIES about smallpox eradication.
That is one reason why giving young children a vaccine that prevents them from getting it when they are young and it is less severe so that they DO get it when they are adults is stupid.
Google seems to have a profound inability to deal with color in their overall impressive graphs.
Why for example do we have green, yellow, red color coding in the lien chart, but in the interactive country map we do have different shades of blue?
Why do in Google Analytics colors in a pie chart change by rank and not by type. That means if search is this period the largest share, it is blue. If next period referrals are the largest share it is also blue and search becomes green. That is sooooo not user friendly. When do we get a Google Usability lab?
Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
No, you are almost guaranteed to get a shot with thimerosal because most flu shots are multi-dose. Since they guess as to the strain that will be prevalent, they generally make shots that protect against several strains at once.
In addition to mercury, these shots also have aluminum and formaldehyde. Mercury and Aluminum are neurological poisons-they accumulate in the brain. Formaldehyde is a known carcinogen and is used to embalm the dead. There is no safe level of formaldehyde established for injection into a living organism.
Multi-dose doesn't mean it has inoculations against multiple strains. It means that the same liquid in a single vial is used to inject multiple people. A larger vial is used and several people get shots from it. This reduces costs. In the US, they are more concerned about getting sued if you catch something that could be traced to a contaminated vial than the cost of the vial, so they use single-dose vials where one person gets a shot from it and then the vial is thrown away. Thimerosal is not used in these vials.
See this chart:
http://www.vaccinesafety.edu/thi-table.htm
The 0s are single-dose preparations. For example Fluarix "FLUARIX is supplied as a 0.5 mL dose in a prefilled syringe." These are what is used in the US.
Are you sure you know what you are talking about?
In addition to mercury, these shots also have aluminum and formaldehyde. Mercury and Aluminum are neurological poisons-they accumulate in the brain. Formaldehyde is a known carcinogen and is used to embalm the dead. There is no safe level of formaldehyde established for injection into a living organism.
Formaldehyde is used to prepare the deactivated viruses used in the shot. It is not part of the final shot (of course there could be trace amounts).
There's no aluminum used in flu shots either it seems.
You might want to look into the idea of not spreading false info.
Since I have never had the flu (in the past 10 years anyway) I fail to see why I should get an injection. If you are susceptible or if it would be hazardous to get the flu, then by all means if you choose to do it then get the shot. But injecting a perfectly healthy person with chemicals known to cause problems simply doesn't make any sense. My body, my choice as to what goes into it.
I don't get flu shots either. That's my choice. But it isn't because I feel they are unsafe.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
lewrockwell?
Sorry, I don't get my info from cranks.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
This is the sort of shit that continues to seriously impress me about Google. Every now and then, beyond simply serving excellent web search results (and ads), they roll out some project that by its nature turns raw, incomprehensible data and statistics into user-parsable information. They're creating the William Gibson data matrix in realtime.
I just wish they'd bring back Google Answers. I am more than willing to shell out $10-$50 (plus tip) to have a group of expert researchers find the answer to the few questions that can't be wrung out of their own search engine. Quite frankly I simply can't understand why they axed the project, as it seemed to have a fair amount of activity and most questions were answered successfully, despite their lack of advertising and promotion of the service. I daresay it was a better business model than spending however many kabillion overinflated dollars they spent for YouTube.
I don't trust single point data.
At least here someone will call out another for proffering me bullshit.