Advances in using Internet searches to track dengue

PLoS Comput Biol. 2017 Jul 20;13(7):e1005607. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005607. eCollection 2017 Jul.

Abstract

Dengue is a mosquito-borne disease that threatens over half of the world's population. Despite being endemic to more than 100 countries, government-led efforts and tools for timely identification and tracking of new infections are still lacking in many affected areas. Multiple methodologies that leverage the use of Internet-based data sources have been proposed as a way to complement dengue surveillance efforts. Among these, dengue-related Google search trends have been shown to correlate with dengue activity. We extend a methodological framework, initially proposed and validated for flu surveillance, to produce near real-time estimates of dengue cases in five countries/states: Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, Singapore and Taiwan. Our result shows that our modeling framework can be used to improve the tracking of dengue activity in multiple locations around the world.

Publication types

  • Historical Article

MeSH terms

  • Asia, Southeastern
  • Brazil
  • Computational Biology
  • Databases, Factual
  • Dengue* / epidemiology
  • Dengue* / history
  • Dengue* / transmission
  • History, 20th Century
  • History, 21st Century
  • Humans
  • Internet*
  • Mexico
  • Population Surveillance
  • Search Engine*

Grants and funding

SY, FL, and MS were supported by a grant from the the Synergist, award 01-2016. SCK’s research is supported in part by NSF grant DMS-1510446. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.