ArticleJournal of biomedical informatics2013
A method for estimating from thermometer sales the incidence of diseases that are symptomatically similar to influenza.
Article in Journal of biomedical informatics, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Using Over-the-Counter Retail Medication Sales to Detect and Track Influenza-Like Illnesses Including Novel Diseases: Surveillance Modeling Study.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2026Article
- An evaluation of a Bayesian method to track outbreaks of known and novel influenza-like illnesses.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- A Bayesian System to Detect and Track Outbreaks of Influenza-Like Illnesses Including Novel Diseases: Algorithm Development and Validation.JMIR public health and surveillance · 2024Article
- A method for detecting and characterizing outbreaks of infectious disease from clinical reports.Journal of biomedical informatics · 2015Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Early detection and accurate characterization of disease outbreaks are important tasks of public health. Infectious diseases that present symptomatically like influenza (SLI), including influenza itself, constitute an important class of diseases that are monitored by public-health epidemiologists. Monitoring emergency department (ED) visits for presentations of SLI could provide an early indication of the presence, extent, and dynamics of such disease in the population. We investigated the use of daily over-the-counter thermometer-sales data to estimate daily ED SLI counts in Allegheny County (AC), Pennsylvania. We found that a simple linear model fits the data well in predicting daily ED SLI counts from daily counts of thermometer sales in AC. These results raise the possibility that this model could be applied, perhaps with adaptation, in other regions of the country, where commonly thermometer sales data are available, but daily ED SLI counts are not.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.