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Flu News for Senior Citizens
Google Provides Instant Tracking of Flu Trends that
May Protect Many Elderly
Early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza;
early detection is critical to helping health officials respond quickly
and save lives of senior citizens
 Nov.
12, 2008 Maybe Google should be persuaded to track down Obama Bin
Laden. It seems no challenge is too big for their tracking program. The
latest is Flu Trends, that Google engineers say can accurately estimate
the level of flu in each state in near real time. It could be a
life-saver for senior citizens that need a dire threat to motivate them
to get their flu shot.
While traditional flu tracking systems take 1-2
weeks to collect and release data, Google search queries can be
automatically counted immediately.
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FLU
NEWS |
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During the last flu season, we shared our
preliminary results with the Epidemiology and Prevention Branch of the
Influenza Division at CDC, and together we saw that our search-based flu
estimates had a consistently strong correlation with real CDC flu data,
Google said in their announcement.
Flu Trends can help serve as an early-warning
system for outbreaks of influenza, which affects millions, and kills
hundreds of thousands every year. Early detection is critical to helping
health officials respond more quickly and save lives.
To learn more, check out the
Official Google Blog and
www.google.org/flutrends.
Google.org Battles Bugs & Viruses
Over
$14 Million to
Partners Working to Predict and Prevent the Next Pandemic
Last month, Google.org, the philanthropic arm of
Google, announced grants of more than $14 million to support partners
working in Southeast Asia and Africa to prevent the next pandemic.
Google.org's Predict and Prevent initiative is supporting efforts
to identify hot spots where diseases may emerge, detect new pathogens
circulating in animal and human populations, and respond to outbreaks
before they become global crises.
Several new lethal infectious diseases crop up
every year. Examples include the well-known killers, HIV/AIDS, bird flu,
and SARS, as well as drug-resistant strains of ancient scourges malaria
and tuberculosis. Three-quarters of new diseases are zoonoses, meaning
they've jumped from animals to humans.
"Business as usual won't prevent the next AIDS or
SARS. The teams we're funding today are on the frontiers of digital and
genetic early detection technology. We hope that their work, with
partners across environmental, animal, and human health boundaries, will
help solve centuries-old problems and save millions of lives," said Dr.
Larry Brilliant, Executive Director, Google.org.
Identifying hot spots
Knowing where to look is critical to disease surveillance. Climate
change and deforestation increase human-animal contact, and with it,
disease spreads. "The holy grail is to predict disease outbreaks before
they happen. For Rift Valley fever and malaria, long-term weather
forecasts and deforestation maps can show us where to look for
outbreaks, up to six months in advance," said Frank Rijsberman, Program
Director, Google.org.
The Woods Hole Research Center - $2 million
multi-year grant to support high-resolution satellite mapping of forests
to enhance monitoring of forest loss and settlement expansion in
tropical countries. WHRC will create information to share with
environmental and human experts so they can better anticipate the
emergence of infectious diseases. For more information, please visit
http://www.whrc.org/.
Columbia University International Research
Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) - $900,000 multi-year grant to
improve the use of forecasts, rainfall data and other climate
information in East Africa, and link weather and climate experts to
health specialists so they can better predict outbreaks of infectious
diseases. For more information, please visit
http://portal.iri.columbia.edu/portal/server.pt.
University Corporation for Atmospheric Research -
$900,000 multi-year grant to build and implement a system that will use
weather projections to inform and target response to disease threats in
West Africa. For more information, please visit
http://www.ucar.edu/.
Detecting diseases earlier
Genetic detection filters viral information in DNA to uncover deadly new
pathogens, and digital detection mines online data to reveal early
signals of possible epidemics. "We want to stop viruses dead in their
tracks their animal tracks before they jump to humans," noted Dr.
Mark Smolinski, Google.org's Threat Detective.
Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (GVFI) - $5.5
million multi-year grant (with equal funding from the Skoll Foundation)
to support the collection and analysis of blood samples of humans and
animals in hot spots within Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo,
China, Malaysia, Lao PDR and Madagascar. The GVFI team, headed by Dr.
Nathan Wolfe, has demonstrated that potentially pathogenic animal
viruses jump more frequently to humans than previously believed and will
work to detect early evidence of future pandemics. For more information,
please visit
http://gvfi.org/index.html.
Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health
- $2.5 million multi-year grant to support research to accelerate the
discovery of new pathogens, and to enable rapid, regional response to
outbreaks by establishing molecular diagnostics in hot spot countries
including Sierra Leone and Bangladesh. Dr. Ian Lipkin and colleagues
have discovered more than 75 viruses to date, established critical links
between infection and the development of acute and chronic diseases,
including pneumonia, meningitis/encephalitis, cancer, and mental
illness. For more information, please visit
http://cii.columbia.edu/.
Children's Hospital Corporation supporting
Healthmap and ProMED-mail - $3M multi-year grant to combine HealthMap's
digital detection efforts with ProMED-mail's global network of human,
animal, and ecosystem health specialists. Together, these programs will
assess current emerging disease reporting systems, expand regional
networks in Africa and Southeast Asia, and develop new tools to improve
the detection and reporting of outbreaks. For more information please
visit
http://www.childrenshospital.org/,
http://www.healthmap.org/en, and
http://www.promedmail.org/pls/otn/f?p=2400:1000:.
"On every continent, viruses move from animals into
people. GVFI's mission is to monitor this viral exchange. Working in
animal markets, with restaurant workers, and with hunters at the end of
the road, we sort through this traffic to try to stop deadly diseases
before they spread," said Dr. Nathan Wolfe, Founder and Director, Global
Viral Forecasting Initiative.
For more information and a Google Earth Layer
highlighting the grantees, please visit
http://www.google.org/predict.html.
About Google Inc.
Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people
around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford
Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web
property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising
program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while
enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered
in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia.
For more information, please visit
http://www.google.com.
About Google.org
Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, uses the power of
information to help people better their lives. We develop and invest in
tools and partnerships that can help bring shared knowledge to bear on
the world's most pressing challenges in the areas of climate change,
economic development and global health. For more information, visit
http://www.google.org.
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