Right before the beginning of flu season — about a week ago — Google revealed a new gizmo called Google Flu Trends. The program counts the amount of influenza related searches that go through Google, pinpointing where the searches come from and sending the information to the U. S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). As many students know, influenza is a respiratory disease that can cause mild to severe illness. The virus is also responsible for approximately 500,000 deaths per year across the globe. About 36,000 of these are in the U.S.The program works because, according to the Google’s Web site, they “have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms.”  While not everyone who searches “flu” has flu symptoms, a pattern emerges when queries from each state and region are added together. According to Google’s Web site, The CDC’s U.S. Influenza Sentinel Provider Surveillance Network has been gathering information on flu outbreaks for several years.  The CDC uses a range of techniques to keep up with influenza across the U.S. each year. One technique uses a network of more than 1,500 doctors who see approximately 16 million patients each year. This procedure relies on doctors keeping up with the “ILI percentage,” which is the number of patients who have flu like illness. CDC along with state health departments collect the percentages from the doctors and combine the data each week.The problem with their program is that it has a delay of seven to 14 days. The Google program is more advantageous because it can gather and aggregate data and publish flu estimates every day. The program has been tested for the past five flu seasons and compared to the “ILI percentage” the CDC has been gathering during those seasons, the numbers are incredibly similar. Google Flu Trends may be able to give us an early-warning system for detecting outbreaks of influenza because of this new technology. This is an important development for epidemiologists because early detection of a disease outbreak can reduce the number of people affected, and potentially save lives.  The Google day-to-day influenza estimates may allow public health officials and doctors to better respond to seasonal epidemics. Anyone can go on the Web site (www.google.org/flutrends) and see what the flu activity is in any state. Louisiana currently has a low level of flu activity. Flu Trends is exciting technology for someone like myself, who used to be pre-med.  It will give individuals and families the ability to become more aware of the flu conditions in their state. The technology can only get better. Soon we might be able to see if there are outbreaks by county or city. The developers might then be able to narrow it down to neighborhoods or certain parts of larger cities. Unfortunately, with great technology comes more responsibility. Although this technology is helping the health care industry, we cannot forget to protect individual rights. Any time a private entity sends information to the government, a red flag should go up. Our right to privacy should always be protected, particularly with regards to the Internet.The American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana had an interesting take on Google’s new program. Marjorie Esman executive director of the ACLU feels that as a public health tool the program is “beneficial.” Esman thinks as long as no private information is released there are no civil liberty concerns. As long as all they do is reveal where there are outbreaks of influenza, she thinks there was no problem. When asked if this program might be a step in the wrong direction as far as monitoring Internet activity goes, Esman said it would only be bad if Google released personal or identifying information. Esman felt that the program wasn’t much different than when doctors send in the information to the CDC as long as it’s not anything personal or identifying. Google’s Web site says the company understands their responsibility to protect user privacy. The site states, “Google Flu Trends can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week.” “We rely on millions of search queries issued to Google over time, and the patterns we observe in the data are only meaningful across large populations of Google search users,” according to the Web site. The Google Flu Trends program is a great step for preventing the spread of disease. As long as individual rights are protected, I have no complaints.—-Contact Matthew Gravens at [email protected]