New Application Aims to Detect Flu Outbreaks Faster

Sep. 2, 2009— -- In the latest use of the Internet and social media to counter the flu and infectious diseases, researchers from MIT and Harvard said Tuesday that iPhone users have a new means of monitoring the spread of swine flu and other disease outbreaks.

The new iPhone application, "Outbreaks Near Me," attempts to track the spread of flu outbreaks by monitoring social media and news reports online, using an existing resource called HealthMap, started in 2006. The app is a joint venture between MIT's Media Lab and Children's Hospital Boston.

"The idea is to try to put public health information in the hands of a greater number of people," said John Brownstein, who co-founded HealthMap and is an assistant professor in the hospital's informatics program. "This is a whole new realm of potential users of applications."

He said about 5,000 people downloaded the app on its first day.

A viewing of the app itself reveals it may not have entirely escaped some of the criticisms of past flu-tracking systems. It had an alert for the Washington, D.C., area, this morning, for instance, although a closer look revealed that the alert was triggered by an article about a hypothetical outbreak in schools in a local newspaper.

When ABCNews.com looked at a flu-tracking tool from Google last year, researchers noted that for many tracking tools, false positives could be an issue.

"There's that potential that things are incorrect and we try to be as explicit about that as possible," Brownstein said. "It's an automated system and things fall through the cracks and we try to correct them as quickly as possible."

He added that some precautions are present.

"The idea is that they link to the original source, so it's not like we're seeing a spike of news reports without any context," Brownstein said.

"Outbreaks Near Me" represents the latest venture in outbreak tracking. In November, Google unveiled Google Flu Trends, a collaboration with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, designed to help people know about flu outbreaks even more quickly than existing surveillance methods.

Google said its system would be able to detect influenza outbreaks up to two weeks faster than the traditional systems in use.

"As with any communicable disease, early detection is key for health professionals to react quickly," said Jeremy Ginsberg, the lead engineer who developed the new site.

"With online search queries, what we see is millions of people who are interested in searching online for information about health. And with winter approaching, more people will be curious about flu, because we are entering the flu season."

A paper accompanying the launch of the site was accepted by the journal Nature, with the editor in chief, Philip Campbell, praising the "exceptional public health implications of this paper."

The journal is allowing the paper to be discussed with the public before it is published.