Knowing if you're at risk for getting the flu is now just a mouse click away, as web-search giant Google has launched a new tool that can estimate flu incidence rates.
The new tool, called Google Flu Trends, tallies daily flu-related search queries from Google.com to estimate how many people in a given region in the United States have an influenza-related illness.
The tool will provide users with "up-to-date influenza related activity estimates for each of the 50 states in the U.S.," according to a posting on the company's official blog.
The post did not say if or when flu-related statistics for other parts of the world, including Canada, might be included.
The company believes its data will be accurate after it compared information from hundreds of billions of common search queries during flu season with flu incidence data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
"We found that there's a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week," the blog said. "As a result, if we tally each day's flu-related search queries, we can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness."
Google Flu Trends (google.org/flutrends) is operated via the company's philanthropic arm, Google.org.
The initiative has five areas of focus, one of which is to use "information and technology to empower communities to predict and prevent emerging threats before they become local, regional or global crises," according to a statement on Google.org.
Examples of such threats include infectious diseases, droughts and other environmental catastrophes.
According to the World Health Organization, influenza, also known as the flu, is responsible for as many as 500,000 deaths worldwide each year.
Google hopes that by crunching the numbers daily and offering up-to-date flu outbreak estimates, the tool might serve as an early warning system for influenza outbreaks and help prevent a potentially deadly pandemic.
