The tradition of predicting flu and tracking disease outbreaks has tended to fall exclusively on the shoulders of the Centers for Disease Control. Healthcare entrepreneurs have sought to supplement that info by using big data generated from social media channels such as Twitter to make assessments earlier. A new study by a couple of researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital identifies another website which could be used for this task: Wikipedia.
Influenza is attributed to up to 500,000 deaths each year globally, with up to 3,500 in the U.S. alone.
