Internet-based surveillance systems for monitoring emerging infectious diseases

Abstract

Emerging infectious diseases present a complex challenge to public health officials and governments; these challenges have been compounded by rapidly shifting patterns of human behaviour and globalisation. The increase in emerging infectious diseases has led to calls for new technologies and approaches for detection, tracking, reporting, and response. Internet-based surveillance systems offer a novel and developing means of monitoring conditions of public health concern, including emerging infectious diseases. We review studies that have exploited internet use and search trends to monitor two such diseases: influenza and dengue. Internet-based surveillance systems have good congruence with traditional surveillance approaches. Additionally, internet-based approaches are logistically and economically appealing. However, they do not have the capacity to replace traditional surveillance systems; they should not be viewed as an alternative, but rather an extension. Future research should focus on using data generated through internet-based surveillance and response systems to bolster the capacity of traditional surveillance systems for emerging infectious diseases.

Introduction

Emerging infectious diseases are of particular concern to public health. Emergence is driven by sociocultural, environmental, and ecological factors.¹ The vulnerability of people to emerging infectious diseases has been shown by the emergence of AIDS in the late 1970s, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003, pandemic influenza H1N1 in 2009, and multidrug-resistant nosocomial pathogens, as well as the re-emergence of dengue, chikungunya, and malaria. Traditionally, effective disease surveillance is expensive and needs a formal public health network.² Such systems are maintained by most countries, to varying degrees. Data sources, surveillance methods, analytical approaches, and factors affecting these systems are varied and have been reviewed in detail elsewhere.3, 4 Traditional, passive surveillance systems typically rely on data submitted to the relevant public health authority by physicians, laboratories, and other health-care providers; they provide information crucial to the effective functioning of health systems.⁵ These systems can be complex and expensive. Time and resource constraints, as well as a lack of operational knowledge of reporting systems, adversely affect the completeness of reporting,⁶ resulting in an incomplete account of disease emergence. Furthermore, substantial lags between an event and its notification are common; a result of late or failed reporting and the hierarchical structure of these systems.⁷ The average delay from receipt to dissemination of data by traditional sentinel surveillance networks is roughly 2 weeks.⁸

Internet availability and use has increased greatly in the past 10 years (figure 1 ).9, 10 The availability of health-related information on the internet (of varying quality and legitimacy) has also changed how people seek information about health.10, 11 These changes provide a new means to detect and monitor infectious diseases. The nature of emerging infectious diseases often limits the effectiveness of traditional surveillance systems.¹² Digital surveillance could improve both the sensitivity and timeliness of detection of health events.¹³

Figure 1.

Internet access in resource-rich and resource-poor countries

Data taken from the International Telecommunications Union.⁹

We review recent studies that have exploited internet use and search trends to monitor two acute-onset viral illnesses of worldwide importance that have substantial seasonal and geographic variation: influenza and dengue. We critically analyse the effectiveness of monitoring internet data to track these diseases and discuss the advantages and limitations of this approach. Finally, we make recommendations for future research into these systems.

Digital surveillance

Digital surveillance attempts to provide knowledge of public health issues by analysis of health information stored digitally, as well as the distribution and patterns governing access to these data. Approaches to digital surveillance vary according to the media targeted. However, all exploit changes in behaviour related to information seeking, collection, storage, and communication pathways that have occurred with the development and increased availability of the internet and associated technologies.

Several surveillance systems use non-structured, event-based, digital data.¹⁴ The Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN)—developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada— automatically retrieves information about potential public health emergencies from news feed aggregators and distributes this information to public health agencies, including the WHO Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network.2, 15 The effectiveness of this system was shown during the SARS outbreak; GPHIN detected SARS more than 2 months before the first publications by the WHO.² Other systems—eg, HealthMap¹⁶ and ProMED-mail17, 18—provide information about emerging public health problems by aggregating information about emerging diseases from various structured and non-structured data sources. These and other similar systems are reviewed elsewhere.13, 14, 19

Internet use has increased consistently in almost every country.²⁰ Internet users in the USA alone generate 8 million queries for health-related information every day.²¹ The increase in worldwide internet availability and use over the past 10 years, combined with these changes in health-seeking behaviour, has created new possibilities for the development of innovative surveillance systems.9, 10, 22, 23 Although still very much in its infancy, analysis of digital data has been used to monitor communicable2, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33 and non-communicable diseases,34, 35 as well as mental health,36, 37 illegal drug use,³⁸ health policy impact,³⁹ and behaviours with potential health implications.⁴⁰

Numerous studies have sought to exploit online health-seeking behaviour to monitor disease incidence. Although these studies use different data sources, they all rely on the premise that people who contract a disease will seek information about their condition from the internet and that incidence can be estimated by tracking changes in frequencies of searches for key terms. By monitoring search queries submitted to the search engine Yahoo!, Polgreen and colleagues⁴¹ predicted increases in positive influenza cultures1, 2, 3 weeks before their occurrence. Similarly, Hulth and co-workers⁴² developed a model for estimating intensity and peak incidence of influenza in Sweden by monitoring queries submitted to the medical web site Vårdguiden. This model correlated closely with both data for influenza-like illness (R²=0·89) and laboratory-confirmed cases of influenza (R²=0·90). A subsequent study showed this model to have good congruence with sentinel data over the course of the 2009 influenza H1N1 pandemic (r=0·88–0·90).⁴³ More recently, influenza incidence in China was estimated by assessment of searches submitted to Baidu (the most commonly used search engine in China).⁴⁴ This study reported a correlation of R²=0·96 between a composite search index (eight terms) and monthly Ministry of Health influenza reports. Furthermore, using a combination of Ministry of Health and Baidu data, the researchers produced accurate estimates (R²=0·95) of incidence 1–2 weeks before of Ministry of Health reports.

Google search queries also correlate highly with disease incidence. Historical logs of aggregated Google search queries—presented as normalised time series—are publically available through Google Trends from Jan 1, 2004. These data are available by country, state, and city in the USA, but only at country-level for many other regions (especially low-income countries). Previously, Google offered two user interfaces to access search reports: Google Trends and Google Insights for Search, which were merged in September, 2012.⁴⁵ Carneiro and Mylonakis²⁴ used Google Trends to analyse worldwide search frequency for the term “bird flu”. They reported an increase in search frequency between 2005, and 2006, coinciding with the spread of avian influenza from China to Turkey. Other studies reported the use of Google search data to monitor the frequency of searches for manually selected terms related to influenza in Chinese,⁴⁶ Spanish,³¹ and French.²⁸ These studies reported high degrees of correlation, which shows the potential application of this technology in languages other than English. Ginsberg and colleagues⁴⁷ used an automated approach to select search terms from Google search logs with the greatest correlation with the US Influenza Sentinel Provider Surveillance Network of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The terms were then used to develop a model for monitoring influenza activity. Estimates from the model correlated highly with regional Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data (r=0·80–0·96, nine regions) and accurately estimate incidence of influenza-like illness 1–2 weeks before surveillance reports.⁴⁷ An online influenza surveillance tool—Google Flu Trends—is based on the model of Ginsberg and coworkers and now includes 29 countries.

To date, two publications have reported the use of internet search data to estimate incidence of dengue. Chan and colleagues⁴⁸ used a similar method to Ginsberg and coworkers⁴⁷ to create models of dengue transmission for Bolivia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Singapore. Correlations between model estimates and holdout surveillance data (data excluded from the model, used for validation) were high for all countries (r=0·83–0·99). These models have been used to develop a free, publically available online resource for dengue surveillance: Google Dengue Trends. Althouse and colleagues⁴⁹ used Google Insights for Search to monitor searches for dengue-related terms and applied these results to step-down linear regression models for Bangkok (Thailand) and Singapore. Both models showed a high degree of correlation with surveillance data (R²=0·95 for Bangkok and 0·94 for Singapore). Additionally, this study developed support vector machine⁵⁰ and logistic regression models to predict periods of high dengue incidence. Area-under-the-receiver-operating-characteristic-curve, using the 75th percentile, was 0·960 for Bangkok and 0·906 for Singapore according to the support vector machine model compared with 0·960 and 0·896 respectively for the logistic regression model.

Google Flu Trends

Several studies have compared the performance of Google Flu Trends with national data for influenza-like illness. Google Flu Trends was visually compared with surveillance data for Australia⁵¹ and New Zealand⁵² over the course of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. Both studies reported good correlation. Another Australian study compared Google Flu Trends and emergency department presentation or hospital admissions for influenza-like illness in 2006–09 (r=0·35 for 2006, r=0·88 for 2007, r=0·91 for 2008, and r=0·76 for 2009).⁵³ These findings accord with the results of Hulth and colleagues⁴³ and Valdivia and colleagues⁵⁴ who showed that Google Flu Trends correlated strongly with estimates of influenza incidence and peak incidences produced from data collected by sentinel physician networks throughout Europe. Finally, Google Flu Trends correlated highly with the Electronic Surveillance System for the Early Notification of Community-Based Epidemics (ESSENCE; a syndromic surveillance system run by the US Department of Defence; r=0·88)⁵⁵ and with influenza-like illness estimates produced for Flanders, Belgium, by the Great Influenza Survey (a weekly, online influenza survey; r=0·62–0·94).⁵⁶

Traditional influenza surveillance systems commonly monitor incidence with virological data, rather than influenza-like illness. Data from Google Flu Trends was highly correlated with data from the US Influenza Virologic Surveillance System (r=0·72);⁵⁷ however, this correlation was lower than that reported for Google Flu Trends and CDC influenza-like illness data (r=0·94). Google Flu Trends estimates have been reported to correlate highly with laboratory-confirmed influenza at a provincial and city level. Malik and colleagues¹² reported the correlation between weekly counts of laboratory-confirmed H1N1 influenza cases in Manitoba, Canada, and Google Flu Trends data during the 2009 influenza pandemic (R²=0·69; 2 week lag). Similarly, Google Flu Trends had a high level of congruence with virology data from a Baltimore hospital (adult r=0·88; paediatric r=0·72).⁵⁸ Dugas and coworkers⁵⁸ noted that Google Flu Trends correlated well with paediatric emergency department crowding measures, leading them to suggest that Google Flu Trends could be used for strategic management of emergency department resources. The potential applications of Google Flu Trends data to strategic allocation of resources and priority setting is further shown by Patwardhan and Bilkovski,⁵⁹ who compared sales of four drugs commonly prescribed for treatment of influenza with Google Flu Trends and CDC ILINet data; aggregate correlation between Google Flu Trends and prescription sales was r=0·92.

Any changes to the status quo of internet search behaviour could alter how well Google Flu Trends models actual influenza incidence. Loss of resolution might occur as a result of media-driven interest or through other events that change search behaviour.43, 49, 57, 58, 60, 61 Google Flu Trends accounts for changing search behaviour by updating the model each year to best represent reference surveillance data.⁶² Despite this precaution, a loss of resolution was reported to have occurred during the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic.53, 58 Cook and coworkers⁶² updated the Google Flu Trends model with a larger pool of candidate queries, less common queries, and historical logs that included searches done during the initial months of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. The new model incorporated roughly 160 queries versus 45 used in the original model. Although the original Google Flu Trends model had a high degree of correlation with ILINet data before the 2009 pandemic (September, 2003, to March, 2009; r=0·91) and over the entire course of the outbreak (March–December, 2009; r=0·91), correlation during the initial wave of the pandemic was low (March–August, 2009; r=0·29). Correlations of the updated Google Flu Trends model were higher for all periods analysed, most notably during the initial wave (r=0·95). These results show the effect that changing search behaviours can have on surveillance systems based on internet search queries and the importance of continual assessment of the performance of such systems.

Predictive models and integration of surveillance systems based on internet search queries

Studies have predominantly focused on retrospective assessment of the performance of Google Flu Trends. However, almost real-time disease tracking can be done by application of Google Flu Trends data to a season-specific compartmental mathematical model.⁶³ Google Flu Trends data can also be used for early detection of epidemics.⁶⁴ Pervaiz and colleagues applied various algorithms to Google Flu Trends data to develop early epidemic detection systems capable of generating actionable alerts. Although this study did not identify a single best method, it showed the potential use of Google Flu Trends data in this manner. Zhou and coworkers⁶⁵ have developed a system to predict epidemic alert levels from daily Google Trends data. Hidden Markov model-based methods predicted influenza alert levels in real-time with 97·7% accuracy and provided an indication of influenza activity up to 4 weeks ahead of the release of CDC reports. In another recent study, ensemble adjustment was used to assimilate Google Flu Trends data into a humidity-driven compartmental mathematical model, enabling real-time predictions of peaks to be made more than 7 weeks in advance of their occurrence.⁶⁶ Finally, using a negative binomial generalised autoregressive moving average model—which included Google Flu Trends data as a secondary variable—Dugas and colleagues⁶⁷ predicted weekly influenza cases at a medical centre with a high degree of accuracy (83% of estimates were within seven cases).

These models are promising and, overall, Google Flu Trends seems to provide timely and accurate estimates of influenza-like illness and laboratory-confirmed influenza. However, methods to integrate this information into existing surveillance systems need to be developed.⁵⁵ Scarpino and colleagues⁶⁸ postulated that the predictive power of the Texas ILINet could be improved by use of a smaller set of carefully chosen sentinel providers. Additionally, they investigated the potential of incorporating Google Flu Trends data into the network as a virtual provider. Google Flu Trends was reported to have a high degree of correlation with the ILINet in Texas (R²=0·77 at a 0 week lag). It was the most informative provider, matching the predictive performance of an optimised network of 44 sentinel providers.

Social media

The power of social media as both a source of information and as a means of disseminating information is increasingly recognised in public health.69, 70 Corley and colleagues⁷¹ have proposed that influenza incidence could be estimated by tracking use of key terms in web and social media. They analysed the frequency of English language blog posts that contained the terms “influenza” or “flu” and compared these with CDC ILINet data. Correlation was r=0·63 for this study and r=0·55 in a subsequent study with an extended dataset.⁷² Microblogs (such as Twitter) were not included in these studies. Collier and coworkers⁷³ used supervised learning to categorise expressions from Twitter messages into five influenza-related categories and correlated these expressions with CDC data for positive influenza A H1N1 tests. Correlations in this study (r=0·58–0·67) were similar to those for Corley and colleagues. 71, 72 Chew and Eysenbach⁷⁴ sorted Twitter posts containing terms related to influenza A H1N1 into groups describing “personal experiences” or “concern” and compared these with H1N1 incidence rates in the USA. Correlations were r=0·77 for “personal experiences” and r=0·66 for “concern”. These correlations are not as high as those reported for approaches based on internet search queries. However, Lampos and Cristianini⁷⁵ reported correlations of up to r=0·933 for their analysis of influenza created with a supervised learning framework compared with influenza-like illnesses reported by the UK Health Protection Agency. They concluded that a supervised learning framework is a suitable method for selection of features for use in digital surveillance systems. Culotta⁷⁶ reported that the accuracy of estimates could be improved by use of a document classification component; they reported correlations of up to r=0·97.

Advantages and limitations of web-based surveillance systems

Google Flu Trends usually showed an increase of influenza incidence 0–2 weeks before traditional systems. Internet-based surveillance systems circumvent the bureaucratic structure of traditional systems. Furthermore, they target a different section of the community to traditional surveillance systems. Zeng and Wagner's⁷⁷ model of patient behaviour during epidemics identifies four phases in health-care seeking: recognition of symptoms, interpretation of symptoms, representation of illness, and seeking treatment. Traditional surveillance systems only source data from people seeking treatment. Internet-based surveillance systems access people from not just the final phase, but also the earlier interpretation of symptoms and representation of illness phases.⁴⁸ However, internet-based surveillance systems are limited to people who seek health-related information on the internet (or proxies, such as parents or carers of sick children). Despite this limitation, they can capture many cases. Attrition during disease pathogenesis or health-seeking pathways is both high and cumulative—results of a study done in rural Cambodia showed that 67% of cases of haemorrhagic fever were treated at home, rather than in a health facility; thus, a health-care-based surveillance system would miss 67% of information before it even becomes accessible.⁷⁸ Systems that target points earlier in surveillance will produce more timely information. For an influenza epidemic with a 20% infection rate, 10% clinical attack rate, 2% case hospital admission rate, and 0·1% symptomatic case fatality rate,⁷⁹ the fraction of the population assessable by an internet-based surveillance system (7488 people per 100 000 patients) would be nearly ten-times that of a traditional system (750 people per 100 000 patients), for a population with the internet use of an average high-income country (76·8%; figure 2 ).⁹

Figure 2.

Proportions of the population assessable by traditional and internet-based surveillance systems during an influenza epidemic in high-income and low-income countries

Light blue sections correspond with fractions visible to internet-based surveillance systems in high-income countries, dark blue corresponds to low-income countries. Red sections indicate background noise. Grey sections indicate fractions not visible to internet-based surveillance systems. Adapted from Watson and Pebody.⁷⁹

Internet-based surveillance systems work best for large populations²⁴ and their use can be limited by national infrastructure (figure 3 ). Although the fraction of people assessable with an internet-based system in the average low-income country (30·7% internet access) is only 2993 people per 100 000 patients (figure 2), this fraction still exceeds that of a traditional surveillance system (750 people per 100 000 patients). The number of people who have access to the internet is not the only relevant factor. Internet use and health-seeking behaviour vary between different sectors of the community.23, 80 The accuracy of national Google Flu Trends estimates is positively correlated with the proportion of the population who use the internet to obtain health-related information.⁵⁴ However, large discrepancies exist between availability and uptake of the internet, and seeking health-care information as a proxy for disease has biases stemming from unequal use and access.²⁰

Figure 3.

Percentage of population who use the internet, by country

2012 data⁹ were used for all countries, except the British Virgin Islands (2010).

The spatial resolution of Google Flu Trends (and Google Trends) is improving. At present, Google Flu Trends offers some city-level estimates of influenza incidence in the USA but probably has neither the sensitivity nor spatial resolution necessary to detect small, localised outbreaks.¹² Spatial resolution is limited by the level of data aggregation and search volume; resolution should improve over time as overall internet access increases and the internet becomes more widely accepted as a source of health-based information.⁵⁴ Results of these systems should also be interpreted carefully. Although internet-based surveillance systems seem to have high correlation with traditional surveillance systems, overall correlations could hide short-term periods of high variance. ⁶²

Translation of internet-based data into an accurate, meaningful, and useful format is a challenge. Bias introduced by self-reporting and media-driven interest might be the biggest confounder of internet-based surveillance systems. Targeting microblogs has the potential to track, not just disease activity, but also related community concerns and perceptions.⁷³ However, the frequency of posts on social media is generally accepted to be a function of personal experience and perception of what an individual believes their friends and followers would find interesting, rather than a true reflection of the occurrence of an event.⁸¹ Similarly, the media drive search frequency. An increase in searches for “bird flu” occurred in the USA between 2005 and 2006, despite no avian influenza being detected; this trend was attributed to media-driven interest about the influenza outbreak affecting Asia at the time.²⁴ A similar occurence was reported for dengue-related searches in India in 2006; an unusually large spike in searches was attributed to news that a member of the prime minister's family had been admitted to hosptial for dengue.⁴⁸ To reduce the effect of media-driven searches, the Google Dengue Trends model replaces spikes that exceed the mean of the previous 4 weeks by five SDs with an imputed value.⁴⁸ Media-driven behaviour does not exclusively affect internet-based surveillance systems. On April 26, 2009, the US CDC declared a national public-health emergency in response to the emerging H1N1 pandemic; the following week was termed fear week.⁶¹ Despite state-wide viral surveillance data showing little influenza activity, emergency department patient volumes increased substantially. A similar trend occurred in a Baltimore paediatric emergency department.⁵⁸ Because changes in Google Flu Trends over this period correlated with the increase in emergency department patient volumes, the investigators suggested that Google Flu Trends could have a role in planning emergency department surge capacity;⁵⁸ rather than representing influenza incidence, Google Flu Trends identified public perceptions of the threat of influenza and predicted the associated increase in health-care demand.

Unlike systems that rely on input from health-care practitioners or laboratories, internet-based surveillance instruments are unlikely to become overwhelmed during a pandemic and, because they are automated, are available year-round (contingent on sufficient search volume), whereas traditional networks might only operate seasonally.⁸² These internet-based systems could be of particular use in countries with poorly developed traditional surveillance systems.⁵² However, implementation of such systems in these countries is fraught with difficulties. Internet-based surveillance systems work on the premise that disease incidence correlates with frequency of information-seeking using specific terms. Textual information can be difficult to classify and interpret⁸³ and accuracy might be heavily affected by cultural nuances, language shifts, and use of colloquialisms or even memes. The model of Collier and coworkers⁷³ needed a filter to reduce the effect of terms such as “Bieber fever” (which refers to infatuation with Canadian pop musician Justin Bieber) on the keyword of interest, “fever”. Changes to search behaviours and information-seeking practices will affect the performance of these models;⁶² furthermore, such changes are unlikely to occur uniformly. The re-emergence of infectious diseases with similar clinical presentations—eg, chikungunya in dengue-endemic areas—also presents a difficulty.⁴⁸ Models should be designed for a specific system (country or region) and be validated against reference data before they are used to guide health policy or action. As such, they cannot replace traditional surveillance.⁴²

The problem of privacy has been raised by several researchers.2, 48, 83 For ethical reasons, data are de-identified or—in the case of data from Google—aggregated before public release, precluding identification of the source of specific posts or searches. Although not a problem in itself, this process could make interpretation difficult. Content cannot be connected with individuals and care should be taken not to commit an ecological fallacy—to make inferences about the characteristics of individuals based on aggregate data.³⁶ Finally, the security of health information is an imperative.⁸⁴ Google Flu Trends and Google Dengue Trends are operated by the philanthropic arm of Google, which is a publicly listed company. Although these services are freely available, Google does not release the search terms used in the algorithms; caution is urged in relying too heavily on closed-source data that are under the control of a multinational company.

Integration of internet-based surveillance technologies into existing surveillance systems

Few studies have explored how to translate internet-based surveillance systems into a public health response. Search queries submitted to Vårdguiden have been used to develop an automated system for generation of reports about epidemiological trends.⁸⁵ GET WELL (Generating Epidemiological Trends from WEb Logs, Like) extracts search queries from Vårdguiden logs, aggregates the data (weekly), and produces time-series graphs. Additionally, the system enables custom statistical analyses to be integrated; this function is routinely used for norovirus and influenza. GET WELL is used by Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control in conjunction with traditional surveillance networks to identify emerging concerns and to focus epidemiological investigations.

The potential for internet-based surveillance systems to revolutionise emerging infectious disease surveillance was shown by Scarpino and colleagues. ⁶⁸ They presented a method for optimisation of sentinel surveillance networks that enabled integration of Google Flu Trends into the network as a virtual provider (enabling it to function as a sentinal provider reporting influenza-like illness within the community). Google Flu Trends alone explained roughly 60% of influenza-associated hospital admissions in Texas; which is equivalent to the performance of an optimised sentinel network with 44 providers (R²=0·63). Furthermore, Google Flu Trends outperformed the 2008 Texas ILINet which drew information from 82 providers (R²=0·57). An optimised network of 82 providers outperformed Google Flu Trends (R²=0·77); however, the best predictive performance was achieved by optimised hybrid networks, which allowed use of Google Flu Trends as a virtual provider. Allowing Google Flu Trends as a virtual provider in a network of 82 providers increased predictive performance by a further 12·5% (R²=0·90).⁶⁸ These studies show potential applications of internet-based surveillance systems in bolstering traditional surveillance system capacity and guiding public health action. However, the routine integration of non-traditional, unstructured, internet-based data into existing surveillance systems will necessitate a change in the structure and rhetoric of units responsible for surveillance if it is to be effectively translated into public health action.⁸⁶

Future research

To date, most studies of internet-based surveillance systems are retrospective analyses of performance; the prospective performance of these systems needs to be assessed. Future studies should not only focus on development of new detection methods nor on application of these methods to new diseases, but they should also explore ways to integrate these approaches into existing systems.⁵⁵ In doing so, care must be taken to ensure that new systems add to the capacity of old ones. The potential application of internet-based surveillance systems is not restricted to surveillance. They can also be strategic instruments for resource management and allocation,58, 59 which warrants further investigation. Finally, despite the potential of internet-based surveillance systems, they have not been applied with a global focus. Strategies for surveillance of infectious diseases have been criticised for focusing too heavily on high-income countries.⁸⁷ New infectious diseases emerge all over the world and their emergence is affected by many sociocultural, economic, environmental, and ecological factors.¹ The international nature of emerging infectious diseases, combined with the globalisation of travel and trade, have increased the interconnectedness of all countries. Strategies to detect, monitor, and control emerging infectious diseases should recognise this change—these diseases are a global concern. The potential to develop global surveillance systems for emerging infectious diseases that use internet-based data should be explored.

Assessment of internet queries for surveillance of emerging infectious diseases is a new concept that has been applied with promising results. These systems are appealing from a logistical, economical, and epidemiological standpoint. Internet-based systems are intuitive, adaptable, operate in almost real-time and, once established, are cheap to operate and maintain.¹² Furthermore, these systems do not rely on the health-care system to provide and analyse data, or a government to disseminate information and advise the international community of emerging concerns—all limitations of traditional surveillance systems. However, internet-based surveillance does not provide an alternative to traditional surveillance systems. Rather, these systems are an extension of traditional systems. The societal effect and extent of spread of infectious diseases within a community cannot be measured by any one surveillance system.⁴³ Surveillance systems should be flexible, built with models that incorporate several means of collecting information, and integrate information from other sources to create a comprehensive understanding of and approach to addressing emerging problems.⁸⁶ Furthermore, addressing emerging infectious diseases is contingent on their recognition as global, rather than regional, issues. A global response requires concerted international approaches to strengthen the capacity of emerging infectious diseases surveillance systems worldwide. Future research needs to focus on how to use internet-based surveillance systems to complement existing systems.

Search strategy and selection criteria

We searched Medline (via PubMed) and Web of Science with the following search terms: “digital disease detection” “Google Flu Trends”, “Google Insights”, “Google Trends”, “infodemiology”, “infoveillance”, “real-time disease surveillance”, and “syndromic surveillance”. We also did searches with the terms “dengue”, “infectious”, OR “influenza” AND “early warning”, “Google”, “internet”, “search engine”, “social media”, “Twitter”, “Facebook”, OR “web”. Finally, we did searches for the terms “internet” OR “web” AND “disease surveillance” OR “disease detection”. To be eligible for inclusion, studies needed to be peer reviewed, describe the use of internet-search metrics or social media data for surveillance of influenza or dengue, and assess performance of this surveillance approach by comparing it with data from traditional surveillance approaches. Results were restricted to those published in English between Jan 1, 2008, and June 30, 2013. The appendix shows the publications that fit the inclusion criteria.