Google launches flu trends for South Africa

With the recent cold front sweeping across South Africa, it’s no surprise that most of are reaching out for all sorts of medication and age-old family remedies in anticipation of a flu outbreak. Wouldn’t it be great if we could use the internet to track increases in flu activity allowing us to be better prepared? It’s with this in mind that Google Flu Trends for South Africa has been launched.

South Africa is the first African country to get this online search tool that first launched in the US in November 2008. The tool provides near real-time estimates of flu activity and offers an early warning of new outbreaks. We’ve aggregated billions of individual searches and compared our data with publicly available data from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD), a division of the National Health Laboratory Service, to come up with the South African results.

See: http://www.google.org/flutrends/za/