Web exclusive: 'How we could have stopped swine flu' by Mark Honigsbaum | Pros... - The Diigo Meta page

• 21 May 09
  

  TransTracker

  The short answer: Spend less time trying to track disease outbreak online and instead spend more time "in the jungle."

  microblogging social media surveillance crowd mining science2.0

  • But it has also begun to use sophisticated new software to trawl the internet for reports of unusual disease outbreaks.
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    This approach to spotting pandemics early has powerful backers. Last November, Google became the latest organisation to throw its weight behind the war on emerging infections diseases (EIDs) when it launched Google Flu Trends, a site which aims to predict annual winter flu outbreaks simply by tracking around 40 common terms people search for when suffering flu-like symptoms. (Google launched the site after its engineers found the results accurately tracked flu reports from doctors’ surgeries and clinics, but without the normal one to two week reporting lag.)

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      TransTracker on 2009-05-21

      Google is not the only "backer" of the approach; nor was it Google engineers who discovered that search trend data can be used to predict disease outbreak. Rather, there is support from scientists who have published articles in peer-reviewed journals indicating that these techniques hold great promise. Framing it as Google being the big backer and the research being an inside job is meant to diminish the idea. But this framing is patently false.
  • But for all their ingenuity, the worry is that these amount to little more than technological tricks.
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • What is needed is a fundamentally different approach, in which rather than waiting for the viruses to come to us, we go and find them first. This is the theory behind “deep viral mining”—essentially traveling to the jungles of Africa and Asia and gathering data on animal viruses before they leap the species barrier to humans.

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        TransTracker on 2009-05-21

        False dichotomy. There is no reason why we need to choose one or the other. We can and should do both. Additionally, both techniques would provide coverage along a greater stretch of the disease outbreak timeline, all while serving slightly different purposes as well (i.e. prevention vs. early-stage detection and ongoing monitoring).
    • Viral mining will do nothing to stop an outbreak like swine flu once it is spreading in the west. But it could stop the next threat. One obvious place to start would be the live animal markets where Asians shop for chickens, ducks and more exotic fare.

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        TransTracker on 2009-05-21

        And what is proposed here would haven't have prevented swine flu either. 1) It didn't start in Aisia. 2) It didn't start in a jungle or with wild animals, but in domesticated animals in a non-jungle area of Mexico, which is not in Asia. Next, "viral mining" will do nothing to provide indications of when preventive efforts fail--i.e. when the disease makes the transition from the jungle animals, through Asian markets, to people. What's more, it would do nothing to help public health officials track the spread of the disease once we have identified that it has passed to people. Again, the two techniques/approachs and associated tools, server slightly different purposes and are in no way mutually exclusive.

Public Stiky Notes

• 
  TransTracker on 2009-05-21
  Google is not the only "backer" of the approach; nor was it Google engineers who discovered that search trend data can be used to predict disease outbreak. Rather, there is support from scientists who have published articles in peer-reviewed journals indicating that these techniques hold great promise. Framing it as Google being the big backer and the research being an inside job is meant to diminish the idea. But this framing is patently false.
• 
  TransTracker on 2009-05-21
  False dichotomy. There is no reason why we need to choose one or the other. We can and should do both. Additionally, both techniques would provide coverage along a greater stretch of the disease outbreak timeline, all while serving slightly different purposes as well (i.e. prevention vs. early-stage detection and ongoing monitoring).
• 
  TransTracker on 2009-05-21
  And what is proposed here would haven't have prevented swine flu either. 1) It didn't start in Aisia. 2) It didn't start in a jungle or with wild animals, but in domesticated animals in a non-jungle area of Mexico, which is not in Asia. Next, "viral mining" will do nothing to provide indications of when preventive efforts fail--i.e. when the disease makes the transition from the jungle animals, through Asian markets, to people. What's more, it would do nothing to help public health officials track the spread of the disease once we have identified that it has passed to people. Again, the two techniques/approachs and associated tools, server slightly different purposes and are in no way mutually exclusive.

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