Using Web and social media for influenza surveillance.

ABSTRACT

Analysis of Google influenza-like-illness (ILI) search queries has shown a strongly correlated pattern with Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention seasonal ILI reporting data. Web and social media provide another resource to detect increases in ILI. This paper evaluates trends in blog posts that discuss influenza. Our key finding is that from 5th October 2008 to 31st January 2009, a high correlation exists between the frequency of posts, containing influenza keywords, per week and CDC influenza-like-illness surveillance data.