The phrase "actual flu" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to distinguish between the real influenza virus and other illnesses that may be mistaken for it.
Example: "Many people confuse a common cold with the actual flu, but the symptoms can be quite different."
Alternatives: "true influenza" or "genuine flu".
Consumer worries may prove to be as big a threat for those in the bird business as an actual flu.
(Google Flu Trends, which found a strong correlation between searches and actual flu cases in America, needed to plough through 450 million mathematical models).
Sometimes its estimate was double the number of actual flu cases recorded by US doctors.
If you are tracking actual flu cases, such conversations about the flu in general can skew the results.
These maps represent Google's estimates of actual flu outbreaks based on correlations between search activity and how many of those people are really sick.
This innovative effort to track the spread of flu is based on the popularity of web search terms that Google researchers have linked to actual flu patterns.
Because the number of actual swine flu cases in the United States is still very small -- especially compared with seasonal influenza outbreaks -- the interactive map at the Flu Trends Web site shows a shockingly docile United States, with low "flu activity" detected in Texas, New York and California, states saturated with news coverage on the topic.
It is possible that producers lower their perceptions about the effectiveness of biosecurity measures when faced with actual bird flu outbreak in the village.
In addition, the emergence of a new influenza subtype A (H5N1) [1], which can be directly, although rarely, transmitted from birds to humans, and especially the recent outbreak of swine-origin H1N1 virus which is transmitted to and spread among humans are potential or actual pandemic flu threats, respectively [2], [3].
(Note that a direct connection between these trends and actual swine flu is not easily established by phylogenetic analysis [ 29, 30], which appears to lack the resolution needed: it could not separate American from Eurasian swine influences).
Because Google Flu Trends estimates of ILI may not necessarily correlate with actual influenza virus infections, we undertook this study to evaluate how Google Flu Trends influenza surveillance data compared with national surveillance data for laboratory-confirmed influenza infections.
