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Items Web searches may have foreshadowed
listeriosis crisis
Source of
Article: http://www.vancouversun.com/health/searches+have+foreshadowed+listeriosis+crisis By
Sharon Kirkey, Canwest News Service Internet chatter
foreshadowed the deadly outbreak of listeriosis a month before the first
reports of death from the food-borne bacteria surfaced in Canada, a new
analysis shows. Who was searching for
information about the disease and why, remain a mystery. But researchers say Google
searches for the term "listeriosis" demonstrated a possible signal
of the outbreak linked to the death of 20 Canadians before the official
announcement was made in Canada. The public was officially
told on Aug. 20, 2008 that a listeriosis outbreak had killed one person and
had sickened 16 others. But researchers from the
University of Ottawa and Harvard Medical School found peak searching for the
term "listeriosis" spiked beginning in mid to late July,
"nearly a month before the declaration of the public outbreak," the
team reports in an article released Thursday by the Canadian Medical
Association Journal. The term
"listeriosis" is more technical than listeria. And peak searching
for the word coincided with cases as they were occurring, as was confirmed
later, and not with public announcements. "In comparison, a
massive increase in searching for the word 'Listeria' coincided perfectly
with news media attention," write the authors. Last summer's deadly
outbreak was traced to ready-to-eat meats produced at a Maple Leaf Foods
plant in Toronto. The company found listeria building up "deep
inside" two slicing machines as the most likely source. The Internet is
"revolutionizing" how intelligence about epidemics and outbreaks is
gathered, write Dr. Kumanan Wilson, of the Ottawa Health Research Institute
and John Brownstein of Children's Hospital Boston. It's also making it more
difficult for countries to hide or to suppress the full extent of an
outbreak. "There's all this
massive amount of information that is being posted through a variety of
different channels on the web — blogs, chat rooms, news media — sources that
come outside of traditional public health," says Brownstein. The
Montreal native is co-creator of HealthMap, a real-time, web-crawling system
that pulls from more than 20,000 sources every hour for information on new
and ongoing infectious disease outbreaks. In November, Google
launched Google Flu trends, which estimates how many people have a flu-like
illness, based on the day's tally of flu-related search queries. Health Canada's Global
Public Health Intelligence Network identified the outbreak of SARS in
Guangdong province in China as early as November 2002 — more than two months
before the World Health Organization published details on the cases. "In the case of
listeriosis, as soon as the outbreak was announced we saw people in Canada
searching for the word "listeria'," Brownstein says. "That's
not surprising. The media drives a lot of people's search habits on the
web." But searching for the more
technical term "listeriosis" began about a month before the public
announcement, "and peaked a couple of weeks before." "We do know it wasn't
just in one location, what we can see is that it was in a few different
places in the country, so it wasn't like someone who was doing their PhD
thesis alone caused the spike," says Wilson, Canada Research Chair at
the University of Ottawa and Ottawa Health Research Institute. It could have been food
inspection or industry officials investigating the possibility of an
outbreak. Or it could have been doctors, or relatives and friends of people
infected early in the outbreak, or people concerned about the initial
voluntary recalls, he said. "The question that
arises from this analysis is whether knowledge of this information, either by
public health officials or members of the public, could have prompted an
earlier response that may have reduced exposure to the contaminated
products," write the authors. "The problem is, this
type of data can be highly noisy and set off lots of false signals,"
Brownstein said in an interview. "How much public health agencies can
use this data still is in question. Is it really people who are getting sick?
What do the data really reflect?" Wilson says it will be up
to public health and others to decide what's an acceptable false positive
rate. "If you're right even
one out of 10 times, if that one time you're able to stop an outbreak that
could kill a lot of people, it may be worth it." The listeria signal
"definitely would have suggested something that needed more
investigation," Wilson says. "A signal like that could have
prompted people to maybe look at this a little more carefully and thoroughly,
and see, how much of a problem are we actually dealing with here?" |
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