Al Classic Google flu tracker had trouble with latest virus

[Laidback Al]

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"If you are looking for Google to give you a clue about the swine flu, I don't think you are going to get it," said Henry L. Niman, a biochemist who studies the molecular evolution of flu cases.

"The system isn't going to register such a small amount of people," said Jamie Yood, a Google spokesman who defended the service. "We think Experimental Flu Trends in Mexico shows an increase in flu activity before media reports of swine flu began."

Some other professional flu trackers agree with Niman. Sharon Sanders, who runs Flutrackers.com, said the hundreds of volunteers who contribute to her site do a better job than Google Flu Trends by relying on news reports about the flu in countries around the world. "Hopefully, humans are better than the machines," she said.

Computer tabulations and frequency counts on key words such as "runny nose," "sore throat," "dizziness," or "atypical pneumonia" will never presage the start of an epidemic or pandemic. While Google touted its ability to give planners a six month lead time, in truth, the Google experiment couldn't even give a six day lead time for this outbreak of S-OI A/H1N1.

Yood, the Google representative, suggests that the system can't register small amounts of increases in the searches. However, all novel influenza outbreaks will begin with a small number of cases.

Another false assumption is that the once such an outbreak occurs sick individuals will turn to the internet to search for information about treatment. This is a very western ethnocentric point of view. Some cultures have different perspectives about what causes diseases and how they are treated. Why does Google believe that people in the small village of La Gloria in Mexico would immediately sign on and search on certain key words relating to their health conditions rather than consulting with local HCWs? In fact, one could ask how many of the people in the village had computer access to the world wide web to even search for information on their symptoms.

FluTrackers members stumbled on news reports of the first apparent, or at least the first recognized, death in Mexico associated S-OI A/H1N1. A search for "atypical pneumonia" pointed to an article on a 39 year old woman from Oaxaca who died on April 13. The news article was published on the 16th of April and was translated and posted here at FT on the 17th.

Within 2 days, FluTrackers members recognized that Mexico represented a developing situation that required further attention. About the same time, the first two cases of S-OI A/H1N1 in southern California were confirmed and reported by the CDC. It was Niman, who is quote in the article above, that was the first to hypothesize in this post here at FluTrackers that the California cases and the Mexico cases were infected by the same strain of the virus that we are now calling S-OI A/H1N1. Not only did Google fail to identify the initial outbreak in Mexico, it also failed to make the significant connection that the cases in the USA and the outbreak in Mexico resulted from the same novel strain of A/H1N1 virus.

The human element, the volunteers here at FluTrackers, are clearly better at discerning trends and making infernces than the Google translation machines. What all of the volunteers at FluTrackers bring to the process that Google can never duplicate is the ability to evaluate and discriminate important facts from filler copy in news articles from around the world. The volunteer participants at FluTrackers come to the site with a diverse set of skills, background, experience, and knowledge that can not yet be duplicate in a computer algorithm.

These members, from all around the world, deserve a round of applause and our gratitude for their tireless effort in searching for information on emerging infectious diseases in hopes of reducing world-wide morbidity and mortality.