Q: Why are so many otherwise healthy children dying from flu? Based on current trends, the number of child deaths could exceed the 148 reported during the 2014-15 season, when the vaccine's poor match resulted in an overall effectiveness of 19percentt.
And research published in PLOS Computational Biology on April 17th shows it is possible to estimate the prevalence of the flu based on visits to Wikipedia articles related to the illness.
This system processes data from Google Flu Trends, which estimates the spread of flu based on search terms related to the disease.
"That whole idea of being able to scrape digital data has helped us find outbreaks faster," says Mark Smolinski, director of Global Health Threats at Skoll Global Threats Fund, a nonprofit that recently helped launch a site called Flu Near You, which tracks flu based on a weekly electronic survey that asks people about their health and any flu symptoms.
Throughout the study period, one of the authors (R. B). monitored all laboratory tests done within Kaiser Permanente and identified the beginning and end of each flu season, based on the number of influenza tests and whether more than 10percentt were positive.
The study, conducted in a Connecticut hospital, was released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which already advises doctors to treat all cold and flu patients based on the severity of their symptoms without waiting for results of flu tests.
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.
We also present a simple flu evolution simulator, based on the current, source-sink, hypothesis for flu cycles.
First, it categorizes the Twitter handles tweeted flu related information based on the amount of replies and mentions within the Twitter network.
Though largely unknown, the impact of the unstructured component on the epidemics dynamics is not necessarily small: for instance, many current flu models are based on the explicit assumption that unstructured contacts account for about 1/3 of the total risk of infection per unit time [4],[5].
