What Is FluTracking?
FluTracking is a pilot online health surveillance system to detect epidemics of influenza. We are looking for people who live in Australia and have easy access to email on a weekly basis.
It takes only 10 - 15 seconds per week to respond to an email about the symptoms you or your household members have had in the previous week. This will help us find ways to detect both seasonal influenza and hopefully pandemic influenza and other diseases so we can better protect the community from epidemics.
You will receive weekly information on influenza-like activity in the region based on our analysis of the data. Participation is voluntary and your information will be kept confidential. 7,776 participants - 8am 23/5/09
FluTracking 2009
We began our annual FluTracking season in the first week of May 2009 and we will be particularly looking for signs of Swine-origin influenza.See last weeks results.
Over the last two years, because the influenza vaccine has been protective against influenza infection in Australia we have seen a divergence between the attack rates of influenza-like illness between our vaccinated and unvaccinated participants with unvaccinated participants having much higher rates of cough and fever.
Early signs that Swine-origin infuenza is having a major impact on Australia would include an increase in cough and fever among both the vaccinated and unvaccinated cases.
Google Flu Searches
We were very excited to learn about Google's entry into influenza surveillance - Google Flu Trends - which uses search term frequencies for symptoms of influenza and other influenza-associated searches to detect influenza activity.
We thought it would be interesting to see what happened if we used Google Trends for Australian influenza related search terms and then compared the results to our Flutracking.net and influenza laboratory notifications.
