Google helps ER docs to predict flu trends

Google may be able to help doctors anticipate when they'll get a surge in the number of patients they see with flu symptoms. A team of doctors, based in Baltimore, relied on Google Flu Trends, a service that tracks the number of flu-related Internet searches. In an article this month in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, those doctors describe how data from Google Flu Trends stacked up against conventional systems to track the spread of flu.