Another reason to love Google.
Dengue is a virus spread by mosquitoes. Symptoms include fever, skin rash, joint pain and headaches. There is currently no vaccine against this disease.
From first hand experience I have never felt anything like it before in my life – it is known as the bone-breaker disease for a reason. 18hours on a bus from Kathmandu with early symptoms starting to show I thought I had somehow broken my back. It took me almost 3 months to recover.
Figure shows Dengue Google Activity for Brazil in blue against information provided by the Ministry of Health in orange
Google has developed a tool for monitoring the disease. Dengue Trends uses aggregated google search data to esetimate current dengue activity around the world in near real time. The tool works on the assumption that, for instance during flu periods, people search for data on flu symptoms (as was found during the November 2008 trial of Google Flu Trends), during hte summer more people search for information on sun burns, the same goes for Dengue.
