According to Google Flu, Tennessee is near it’s annual peak for flu. It’s hard to believe search results can give you such a live view of data we usually don’t see for several weeks from health officials.

Here’s how this works.

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together. We compared our query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in different states and countries around the world. Our results have been published in the journal Nature.

I’m just a little skeptical of this year’s results because I think people in general are looking for more information to protect themselves from the H1N1 flu as well as information on a vaccine, but if this year’s search habits are normal, that’s a dramatically higher number of people with the flu than normally have it at this time.

@kimu says @Grantham also I think the CDC data is only a week behind real time now: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/ about 1 hour ago from Tweetie in reply to Grantham