More Diseases Tracked by Using Google Trends

The nationwide surveillance results of nosocomial infections along with antimicrobial resistance in intensive care units of sixteen university the re-emerging antibiotic for multidrug-resistant gram-negative bacterial infections. rates of resistance to colistin and polymyxin B in subgroups of Acinetobacter baumannii isolates from Korea. dkm305 4. Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute. Performance standards for antimicro-bial susceptibility testing; 16th informa-tional supplement. Document M100-S18. Development of a multilocus sequence typing scheme for characterization of clinical isolates of Acinetobacter baumannii. al. Standardization and interlaboratory reproducibility assessment of pulsed-field gel electrophoresis-generated fingerprints of Acinetobacter baumannii. et al. Differences in phenotypic and genotypic traits against antimicrobial agents between Acinetobacter baumannii and Acinetobacter genomic species 13TU. Analysis of antibiotic resistance genes in multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter sp. isolates from military and civilian patients treated at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. To the Editor: The idea that populations provide data on their influenza status through information-seeking behavior on the Web has been explored in the United States in recent years (1,2). Two reports showed that queries to the Internet search engines Yahoo and Google could be informative for influenza surveillance (2,3). Ginsberg et al. scanned the Google database and found that the sum of the results of 45 queries that most correlated with influenza incidences provided the best predictor of influenza trends (3). On the basis of trends of Google queries, these authors put their results into practice by creating a Web page dedicated to influenza surveillance. However, they did not develop the same approach for other diseases. To date, no studies have been published about the relationship of search engine query data with other diseases or in languages other than English. We compared search trends based on a list of Google queries related to 3 infectious diseases (influenza-like illness , gastroenteritis, and chickenpox) with clinical surveillance data from the French Sentinel Network (4). Queries were constructed through team brainstorming. Each participant listed queries likely to be used for searching information about these diseases on the Web. for France were downloaded from Google Insights for Search, 1 of the 2 websites with Google Trends that enables downloading search trends from the Google database (5). Correlations with weekly incidence rates (no. cases/100,000 inhabitants) of the 3 diseases provided by the Sentinel Network were calculated for different lag periods (Pearson coefficient ρ). The highest correlation with influenza like illness was obtained with the query grippe –aviaire –vaccin, the French words for influenza, …