Flu Season

Personally I have dodged the crud that cycles around the globe each year. Did you know that "the flu" is only slightly more likely to strike a given population in the winter as opposed to warmer seasons. We tend to associate flu outbreaks with the winter because K-12 schools are such fertile breeding grounds for mass exposure to communicable pathogens.

Want to see how your part of the world is fairing today in the flu wars? Here is a link to one of the many Google tracking maps. This one the Flu Trend.

Why Google?

They have found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate current flu activity around the world in near real-time. So if you consult via Google on 'treatments for the flu' or 'symptoms of flu' you add to the cumulative Flu Trend database.