Conducted over the course of a 21-month period, the researchers found a “strong correlation between a rise in Internet searches for flu information, compiled by Google’s Flu Trends tool, and a subsequent rise in people coming into a busy urban hospital emergency room complaining of flu-like symptoms.” Primary investigator of the study, Dr. Richard Rothman, said that the results were promising for “eventually developing a standard regional or national early warning system for frontline health care workers.” More from the press release:

Rothman and his team found the correlation between Internet searches and patient volume was most pronounced when researchers reviewed data showing a rise in search traffic for flu information and the number of children coming into the Hopkins pediatric emergency room with what doctors call influenza-like illness or ILI.

Although the science and medical community has generally accepted that a rise in flu search queries on Google Flu Trends corresponds with a rise in people reporting flu-like symptoms, the Johns Hopkins team is believed to be the first to show that the Flu Trends data strongly correlates with an upswing in emergency room activity.

Currently, emergency departments, hospitals and other health care providers rely on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention flu case reports provided during flu season, October to May, as a key way to track flu outbreaks.

Those CDC reports currently dictating the preparation of hospitals for influenza outbreaks, the researchers say, are simply too slow to reach health care providers in order to be of any use. In the Google era of search technology, there’s a reason that news and cultural trends are described as “viral” when they become popular: they catch on and they spread among people quickly. If videos of politicians doing idiotic things at state fairs can race across an entire country within the period of a few hours in the afternoon, there’s no reason the CDC shouldn’t be able to quickly assess influenza outbreaks in a timely fashion. As a result, Rothman concludes, “[the CDC reports] don’t provide frontline health care workers with a strong tool to prepare day-to-day for a surge in flu cases, even as the flu is spreading in real time. Google Flu Trends, on the other hand, collects and provides data on search traffic for flu information on a daily basis by detecting and analyzing certain flu-related search terms.”

Mark one more in the win column for Team Google, who’s now officially doing better at helping your community stave off flu outbreaks than the United States government agency charged with that same task.

Last year Google launched its Flu Trends tool in the United States, and has now taken the opportunity to expand it into 16 additional countries. The site is also now available in 37 different languages.

"By tracking the popularity of certain Google search queries, we are able to estimate the level of flu, in near real-time," says Google. "While some traditional flu surveillance systems may take days or weeks to collect and release data, Google search queries can be counted immediately. Google Flu Trends provides an additional surveillance tool that may help public health officials and the public make more informed decisions about preparing for the flu season."

"In the past year, we’ve expanded our coverage to include Mexico, New Zealand and Australia and have continued to see a good correspondence between our estimates and official flu activity data. In fact, our analysis of last season shows that Google Flu Trends had a close 0.92 correlation with official U.S. flu data," the company adds.

Countries where Flu Trends is now available include: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, and the US.

The latest project related to saving the world, is Google’s Flu Trends. The tool not only shows you flu data graphically around the U.S. by state, but also information about flu vaccinations, and a search tool to locate your nearest flu shot location. There is also a section about the latest flu news.

 Google Software engineers Jeremy Ginsberg and Matt Mohebbi share some background on the project at the Official Google Blog:

Our team found that certain aggregated search queries tend to be very common during flu season each year. We compared these aggregated queries against data provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and we found that there’s a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week. As a result, if we tally each day’s flu-related search queries, we can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness. Based on this discovery, we have launched Google Flu Trends, where you can find up-to-date influenza-related activity estimates for each of the 50 states in the U.S.

The CDC does a great job of surveying real doctors and patients to accurately track the flu, so why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.

Google’s Predict and Prevent initiative (the Google.org team behind the disease outbreak information (as featured in the above video) focuses on the following methods of finding threats of disease early:

- Digital detection: supporting technology and efforts to detect early online ‘signals’ of emerging threats

- Genetic detection: accelerating the discovery of new pathogens through molecular methods

– Supporting the development of point of care diagnostics for use in developing countries

Google.org is a branch of Google that probably doesn’t get talked about enough. We’re often so focused on how Google can impact our businesses and make our lives easier (or harder), that we don’t think about the really important work that they’re doing.