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arXiv · 1612.02812

Advances in using Internet searches to track dengue

Shihao Yang·S. C. Kou·Fred Lu·John S. Brownstein·Nicholas Brooke·Mauricio Santillana
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Abstract

Dengue is a mosquito-borne disease that threatens more than half of the world's population. Despite being endemic to over 100 countries, government-led efforts and mechanisms to timely identify and track the emergence 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, the trends in dengue-related Google searches 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/regions: 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.

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Shihao Yang, S. C. Kou, Fred Lu, John S. Brownstein, Nicholas Brooke, Mauricio Santillana. 2016-12-08. Advances in using Internet searches to track dengue. https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.02812

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