The May 21, 2009 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine contained a Perspective piece that focused on how public health professionals can harness the Internet for surveillance purposes.

The article’s authors, John S. Brownstein, Ph.D., Clark C. Freifeld, B.S., and Lawrence C. Madoff, M.D., point out early on in the article that the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), a collaborative effort founded by the Public Health Agency of Canada and the World Health Organization (WHO), which uses search queries and news aggregators to retrieve keyword-specific articles from the Internet, was a key element in detecting and monitoring the SARS outbreak in 2002-2003. Since that time, such sites as HealthMap have popped up around the Web. Health Map is a Web application hybrid, or “mashup” that provides real-time monitoring of infectious disease threats worldwide.

Early detection of foodborne illness outbreaks, flu outbreaks, and other public health threats is made possible by monitoring online activity. The authors state that, “An estimated 37 to 52% of Americans seek health-related information on the Internet each year, generally using search engines to find advice on conditions, symptoms, and treatments.” Using its search results, Google Flu Trends is able to track users’ search terms and detect patterns of flu-related keyword searches that may indicate an uptick in illnesses in particular geographic areas. On some level, this information could be helpful to public health officials working to identify flu outbreaks.Continue Reading Food Poisoning and Other Surveillance in the Internet Age