“Early detection, early response” is central to infectious disease control, and thus a high priority of TED Prize winner and executive director of Google.org Larry Brilliant.
Google.org has now made an innovative example of early-detection publicly accessible with Flu Trends. Take a close look at the associated animation — which illustrates the early warning potential of the Flu Trends data. Compared to traditional CDC alerts, detection two weeks earlier is a very big deal w/r/t containing a future influenza pandemic.
…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.
It will be interesting to see if the media framing of this innovation centers around “privacy invasion“. Here’s some of the real-world stuff going on to ensure privacy is NOT an issue:
…Since we launched yesterday, the response from the medical community has been positive. “The earlier the warning, the earlier prevention and control measures can be put in place,” said Dr. Lyn Finelli of the influenza division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to The New York Times. “[T]his could prevent cases of influenza.” You can check out the tool for yourself.
We couldn’t have built this flu detection system without analyzing historical patterns. Because flu season is different every year, just a few months of data wouldn’t have done the trick. For example, the 2003-2004 flu season was unusually severe in many regions. The data from that season was especially robust and allowed us to discover a more accurate, reliable set of flu-related terms. To learn more about how we built the system, see this page on how Flu Trends works.
Because we’re committed to protecting your privacy, we made sure that the searches that we analyze for Google Flu Trends are not drawn from personally-identifiable search histories but rather from an aggregated set of hundreds of billions of searches.
In order to provide a rough geographic breakdown of potential flu outbreaks, we use IP address information from our server logs to make a best guess about where queries originate. To protect your privacy, we anonymize those IP addresses at nine months. And we don’t provide this aggregated, anonymized data to third parties. For more information about the privacy protections for Flu Trends check out our FAQs and privacy policy.
This is just the first launch in what we hope will be several public service applications of Google Trends in the future. And as we continue to think of ways to use aggregated and anonymized search data in helpful ways, we’re also committed to safeguarding our users’ privacy.
Declan Butler has constructed a Google Earth mashup of public databases on animal and human confirmed cases of H5N1. To add this network line to your Google Earth, please click on this link. Then open the downloaded file, which will auto-create the new network links.
See Declan’s blog post for the details and basic how-to, and his original post for a bit more info.
NB: you need v4.0 or later to display the time series animation.
NB: I’ve not figured out how to get the map keys to display.
Caveat: This is a pro-bono effort, so I do not know whether we can depend on the data being up to date. Similarly, accuracy is an unknown.
Technorati Tags: Public Health
I wish that you would help build a global system to detect each new disease or disaster as quickly as it emerges or occurs.
INSTEDD has been very quiet for the past year. Now I think we can say it is really happening. Peter Carpenter has been hired as President and director. Carpenter is the former Executive Director of Stanford University Medical Center.
Below is a brief update on progress, which includes some new scraps of info. E.g., evidently Larry Brilliant was offered the Google.org job on the spot at his TED presentation by Sergey Brin, on a comment card!
UPDATE: TED curator Chris Anderson clarifies the mention of the comment card offer — that was a friendly joke. Larry Brilliant’s appointment was actually announced two days BEFORE his TED Talk. See comments…
As revealed at TED2007:
Larry’s story is that of someone daring to take a journey and then letting the work teach him.
When Larry and his team at Google.org talked to the disaster community about his wish, they told him simply: In a disaster, “We’ve got to be able to find each other.” Their needs broadened his vision. Now, along with early detection, his system will offer disaster-relief agencies a way to communicate and share data, to provide coordinated early response to disasters.
The system is called INSTEDD (International Networked System for Total Early Disease Detection).
In March 2007, the new system undergoes its first pilot project, Working with the Rockefeller Foundation and NTI (Nuclear Threat Initiative), six countries along the Mekong River (Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and the Hunan region of China) will do a tabletop exercise about how they would react to a pandemic flu.
INSTEDD’s goal is to become a trusted source of comprehensive disaster tracking and response tools that enable users to operate more effectively in times of crisis; and, more than that, to foster a community of individuals, nonprofits, companies and government agencies involved in the detection of, and response to, public threats.
How it came together:
Sergey Brin, Larry Page and their colleagues hired Larry as head of Google.org, creating an immensely well-resourced platform for this wish and much more. (Sergey made Larry the job offer on a comment card — which Larry has framed!)
The Silicon Valley Community Foundation provided seed funding to build organization around Dr. Brilliant’s wish — and begin building the system, known as INSTEDD.
INSTEDD received significant pledges of financial support from members of the TED and foundation communities.
TEDster Steven Addis and Addis Creson are providing pro bono naming and branding support.
TEDster Bob Angus and his team at A&R Edelman provided pro bono PR and communications support.
An INSTEDD board was formed: Larry Brilliant: Executive Director, Google.org; Peter Carpenter: President, Managing Director, INSTEDD; David Heymann: Executive Director, Communicable Diseases, WHO; Tara O’Toole: CEO and Director, Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Numerous experts from both the TED and the disaster prevention and response communities donated their time and intellect, including the WHO, Mercy Corps, OCHA, Benetech, Humanity United, the Ethical Globalization Initiative, IBM, ProMed, CDC, the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, NetHope, the International Committee of the Red Cross, OxFam America, the Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response, the World Food Programme and UNICEF.
Into the future:
Says Mark Smolinski, Threat Detective at Google.org: “We don’t even have standards on how we collect basic information on human demographics or health info during a disaster. That’s something that an organization like INSTEDD could help promote.”
Technorati Tags: INSTEDD, Larry Brilliant, Public Health
Roger Bate, author of Malaria & the DDT Story , on the daily consequences of political correctness, in Death to Mosquitos:
While the world understandably focuses on AIDS in Africa, malaria continues to devastate the children of that continent. Dr. Wenceslaus Kilama, a Tanzanian malaria specialist and head of Malaria Foundation International, alarmingly explains that every 30 seconds a child in Africa dies from the disease. “That’s like loading up seven Boeing 747s with children and crashing them into the ground every day, . . . a September 11 every 36 hours,” he says.
But there is one success story to point to. South Africa has reduced its malaria burden by using a combination of the widely reviled insecticide DDT and a new therapeutic drug called Coartem. According to Donald Roberts, professor of tropical diseases at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Maryland, “the insecticide DDT is still the best method to control mosquito-borne dangers like malaria around the tropical impoverished parts of the world.” Unfortunately, no aid or health agencies are learning from the South African experience because of concerns about being seen to endorse DDT. But is DDT really deadly?
“The 1972 banning of DDT in the United States was based more on politics than on any scientific evidence,” says Roberts. The judge presiding over the scientific hearings on DDT ruled, after reviewing all the evidence, that DDT should not be banned, yet he was overruled by William Ruckelshaus, the Environmental Protection Agency head at the time. DDT does persist in the environment, but problems (such as to bird populations) arise only when it’s used in massive doses for farming, not when spraying mosquitoes for disease control. DDT dissipates in the environment slowly but consistently. Furthermore, even after 60 years of human exposure, “there has never been a replicated study published in a peer-reviewed journal showing harm to human health from DDT,” says malaria expert Dr. Amir Attaran.
At issue is not agricultural DDT applications (there are environmentally superior options), but the consequences of the effective ban on DDT spraying of building interior walls in the malaria zones. Contrary to urban myth, DDT is not banned for anti-malarial applications. But the legacy of “Silent Spring” and the environmental movement is the same as if there were legal bans.
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