Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org, has launched a new tool designed to identify and track influenza outbreaks, Reuters reports. Google Flu Trends will monitor the number of queries for influenza and influenza-like symptoms entered into its popular search engine to determine the geographical location and nature of seasonal flu activity. The system will provide near real-time updates of flu activity to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The agency, in turn, will use the information to issue alerts to hospitals, clinics and physician offices in affected regions, enabling providers to stock up on influenza tests; antiviral drugs; and antibiotics for people who develop bacterial co-infections, which can worsen the severity of the flu. Currently, the CDC relies on reports from health centers that submit data on the volume of patients reporting flu-like symptoms and lab tests that confirm the presence of influenza, but that data typically involves a two-week lag time. Google will not charge the CDC for the reports and will keep the individual search data confidential to preserve patient anonymity. The Times notes that, while the service currently applies only to influenza-based queries in the United States, Google hopes to eventually expand the service to include other geographical regions and a wide range of diseases (Helft, New York Times, 11/12/08 [registration required]; Fox, Reuters, 11/11/08).
Hard to get a handle on this. Seems unscientific at first blush, but anything that speeds data gathering in the face of a pandemic could end up buying hours or days that mean many tens of thousands of lives saved. To the extent hotspots could be located and acted upon, that would be a real boon to frontline health workers in affected areas.
The flip side of this, of course, is the threat to personal privacy. Google says such a system of collective information tracking would never be used to breach an individual's personal privacy, that they will "preserve patient anonymity." Are you buying? At what point does this inquiry become a federal HIPAA violation and if it does and the information slows an epidemic, isnt the sacrifice of the few a net positive because it preserves society for the many? (Yeah I watch NBC's "Heroes." What are you driving at?)
The other flip side - wait how many sides is that? - is that once Google or another health information tracking source becomes the holder of this kind of information gathering capacity, it would be very difficult, perhaps impossible, for any single government to shut the information down once a pandemic started. This would prevent misinformation, and perhaps even cut down on the kinds of rumors and apocalyptic speculation that could accompany a pandemic.
Something I know for sure: The general area of health information privacy, and the ethical decisions that accompany it, is one of the key emerging questions this generation of policymakers will be facing, one way or the other.
How's that for an uplifting post? It's Monday night and the wind chill is 17 degrees, what do you want?
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