Advances in using Internet searches to track dengue

作者:Yang Shihao; Kou Samuel C*; Lu Fred; Brownstein John S; Brooke Nicholas; Santillana Mauricio*
来源:PLoS Computational Biology, 2017, 13(7): e1005607.
DOI:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005607

摘要

Dengue is a mosquito-borne disease that threatens over half of the world's population. Despite being endemic to more than 100 countries, government-led efforts and tools for timely identification and tracking of new infections are still lacking in many affected areas. Multiple methodologies that leverage the use of Internet-based data sources have been proposed as a way to complement dengue surveillance efforts. Among these, dengue-related Google search trends have been shown to correlate with dengue activity. We extend a methodological framework, initially proposed and validated for flu surveillance, to produce near real-time estimates of dengue cases in five countries/states: Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, Singapore and Taiwan. Our result shows that our modeling framework can be used to improve the tracking of dengue activity in multiple locations around the world.

  • 出版日期2017-7