A few years back, I bought $300 worth of food and water to store in the basement in case some terrible bird flu hit and we couldn’t leave the house for a week or two. We’ve eaten the good stuff bit by bit and a lot of what is left is now well past its prime.
Even though you don’t hear much about the bird flu anymore, I still believe some sort of infectious pandemic is the single greatest threat to humans, so perhaps it is time to restock my basement.
In the meantime, for the hypochondriac who loves data, the C.D.C. and google.org have competing influenza-surveillance web sites. The C.D.C. has a very detailed weekly flu report, which even describes the antigenic breakdown of the strains of flu that are found. According to the C.D.C., there is essentially no flu activity at the present time in the U.S.
That doesn’t stop people from thinking they’ve got the flu, however, as evidenced by google.org’s Flu Trends page. Google measures flu activity by the number of flu-related searches that take place, and these searches are starting to rise (for more details, see yesterday’s Times article).
Historically, the C.D.C. data and Google data trend quite closely.
There hasn’t been a really bad flu season since 2004. Is that because more people are getting flu shots, or is it just chance?
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If memory serves, wasn’t 2004 the year they didn’t produce enough flu vaccine? If so, that would account for that particular spike … meaning that, had the shortage not occurred, there would have been less flu that year.
(It’s also odd that there was a spike in the flu that year, since when the shortage hit, the public was told that the flu vaccine wasn’t all that necessary and if you had to forgo the shot, you would still be OK. If there truly was a spike in the flu because of the shortage, I’d say that their assurances turned out to have been quite wrong.)
I think flu shots are a factor in stopping the spread. That is, if only a relatively small percentage get the shots, they break the normal vectors (e.g. kid gets flu, gives to parent, who takes to work, etc).
The other big factor is that various Asian countries have taken major steps to prevent outbreak and spread, from quick actions in chicken farms to stopping sick travelers (they monitor arrivals and departures at most of the international airports in China, HK, Japan, Singapore, etc).
I have to say, I think you’re pretty paranoid. Sorry.
Hm, I feel I constantly have a flu, however, that has no point.
The main factor of the bird flu is probably the fear of getting it. In 2007 the H5N1 bird flu killed 59 people worldwide, making it a small problem compared to other death causes.
This is the same as with terrorism. Although I do not have the numbers here, if I knew there was going to be a terrorist action in London during the next 24 hrs in the trams, I should probably be more scared to take my bike that day than travel underground.
Why would I google ‘flu symptoms’ this year when I obtained all the information last year? Do symptoms change that radically?
It would be interesting to see if numbers of searches over time decreases.
I agree, the heighten attention given to the bird flu is not to be taken lightly. If not bird flu then some other communicable disease is going to hit us like something we’ve never seen before. Six of the 18 worldwide epidemics listed in Wikipeda are influenza so if you’re going to worry about some disease, that’s a good one to worry about.
People can’t imagine whole families or communities being wiped out. Of all the natural disasters that have befallen us – even before there was an us – a pandemic is probably more likely than the others, such as Yellowstone caldera erupting, a meteorite or comet striking the earth, that major landslide just waiting to happen in the Canary Islands causing a giant tsunami that wipes out all of the East Coast, New Madrid earthquake, or even the inevitable return to the Ice Age when Canada become uninhabitable and New York City get wiped off the face of the earth. Flu is the one to bet on.
I wonder if the reporting of this story will destroy its accuracy – I can’t be the only person who’s tempted to Google “flu symptoms” just to jack with the numbers.
Won’t the publicity surrounding Google’s use of flu trends muck up their data (as everyone starts entering “flu” into Google just to see what comes up)?