ArticlePloS one2009
Web queries as a source for syndromic surveillance.
Article in PloS one, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 76 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
76 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- School-based surveillance of acute infectious disease in children: a systematic review.BMC infectious diseases · 2021Pooled it
- The Application of Internet-Based Sources for Public Health Surveillance (Infoveillance): Systematic Review.Journal of medical Internet research · 2020Pooled it
- Predicting the incidence of syphilis in China using Baidu search index and an ARIMAX model.BMC infectious diseases · 2026Article
- Animal health syndromic surveillance system in Jordan, a road map for a pilot model.Frontiers in veterinary science · 2025Article
- Non-linear correlation analysis between internet searches and epidemic trends.Frontiers in public health · 2025Article
- Emerging infectious disease surveillance using a hierarchical diagnosis model and the Knox algorithm.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Early Warning and Prediction of Scarlet Fever in China Using the Baidu Search Index and Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average With Explanatory Variable (ARIMAX) Model: Time Series Analysis.Journal of medical Internet research · 2023Article
- ATQ: alert time quality, an evaluation metric for assessing timely epidemic detection models within a school absenteeism-based surveillance system.BMC public health · 2023Article
- Predicting pulmonary tuberculosis incidence in China using Baidu search index: an ARIMAX model approach.Environmental health and preventive medicine · 2023Article
- Effect of Movement on the Early Phase of an Epidemic.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2022Article
- The amount of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater relates to the development of the pandemic and its burden on the health system.iScience · 2022Article
- A Study on Epidemic Information Screening, Prevention and Control of Public Opinion Based on Health and Medical Big Data: A Case Study of COVID-19.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- An evaluation of Internet searches as a marker of trends in population mental health in the US.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- An Association of Influenza Epidemics in Children With Mobile App Data: Population-Based Observational Study in Osaka, Japan.JMIR formative research · 2022Article
- Internet search data with spatiotemporal analysis in infectious disease surveillance: Challenges and perspectives.Frontiers in public health · 2022Article
- Mathematical modeling in perspective of vector-borne viral infections: a review.Beni-Suef University journal of basic and applied sciences · 2022Review
- The Global Infectious Diseases Epidemic Information Monitoring System: Development and Usability Study of an Effective Tool for Travel Health Management in China.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2021Article
- SBDiEM: A new mathematical model of infectious disease dynamics.Chaos, solitons, and fractals · 2020Article
- Google Searches and Suicide Rates in Spain, 2004-2013: Correlation Study.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2020Article
- Internet search data could Be used as novel indicator for assessing COVID-19 epidemic.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2020Article
16 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In the field of syndromic surveillance, various sources are exploited for outbreak detection, monitoring and prediction. This paper describes a study on queries submitted to a medical web site, with influenza as a case study. The hypothesis of the work was that queries on influenza and influenza-like illness would provide a basis for the estimation of the timing of the peak and the intensity of the yearly influenza outbreaks that would be as good as the existing laboratory and sentinel surveillance. We calculated the occurrence of various queries related to influenza from search logs submitted to a Swedish medical web site for two influenza seasons. These figures were subsequently used to generate two models, one to estimate the number of laboratory verified influenza cases and one to estimate the proportion of patients with influenza-like illness reported by selected General Practitioners in Sweden. We applied an approach designed for highly correlated data, partial least squares regression. In our work, we found that certain web queries on influenza follow the same pattern as that obtained by the two other surveillance systems for influenza epidemics, and that they have equal power for the estimation of the influenza burden in society. Web queries give a unique access to ill individuals who are not (yet) seeking care. This paper shows the potential of web queries as an accurate, cheap and labour extensive source for syndromic surveillance.
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