Online Flu Tracking Not a Substitute for Shutdown CDC

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By Meg Wagner2013-10-11 16:39:57 UTC

As cooler weather settles in and the season for sniffles and sore throats looms, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention won't be tracking the pattern of this year's flu.

The government shutdown has furloughed much of the CDC staff, and FluView, the department's weekly Influenza surveillance reports, is frozen.

See also: Space-Loving Twitter Users Cover for NASA During Shutdown

In the shadow of the shutdown, a few online flu trackers — which usually serve as supplements to the CDC's official reports — continue to monitor the illness when the agency cannot.

Flu Near You, a health site that tracks the flu through user-submitted symptoms, has seen a 100% rise in activity, according to Clark Freifeld and John Brownstein, who cofounded HealthMap, the program that started Flu Near You.

Sickweather, an online social health network, has also seen an increase in use, founder Graham Dodge told Mashable. The website scans social media for public, geo-tagged posts that reveal illness. When someone posts "I'm sick," Sickweather adds it to its map.

A 2011 report from Johns Hopkins University suggested that illness trends pulled from Twitter and official CDC reports tracked nearly identical patterns. The only difference: Twitter's results came about two weeks earlier since it tracks in real time without the delay of collection and qualification from an official agency.

But while alternative means of flu tracking exist, they are not a perfect substitute for the CDC, said Susan Polan, associate executive director of public affairs and advocacy at American Public Health Association.

APHA partnered with HealthMap to launch Flu Near You, and Polan helped the team develop the website. While she believes it's a trustworthy service and a useful way to stay informed, she said it is not a replacement for the CDC's weekly flu reports.

"Flu Near You is a great tool, but it doesn't have the reach," she said.

With a strong national presence, the CDC has the capacity to uniformly survey nationwide. On the other hand, Flu Near You relies on self reporting, which could attract "people predisposed to getting a flu shot," and people "already thinking ahead about their health," she said, leading to a potentially biased sample.

Polan also emphasized that the CDC's flu work isn't just about tracking — it's also about prevention of and solutions to outbreaks.

"They can focus on the next step," she said. "They can quickly look at the situation and take action."

While the CDC's FluView has been sidelined during the shutdown, not all of the center has gone dark. Following a Monday public health alert from the USDA about the salmonella outbreak, the CDC allowed nearly a full staff of furloughed foodborne illness specialists to return to work Tuesday, a CDC spokesperson told CBS News.

Additionally, many state and local health organizations are still up and running.

"We continue to provide federally funded services including flu surveillance, vaccine distribution and HIV services," the New York City Health Department said in an emailed statement.

The department said it won't see an impact on its federally funded programs unless the shutdown continues into next year.

Image: Flickr, Michael Verhoef

Topics: CDC, Government Shutdown, health, Health & Fitness, Politics, shutdown, U.S., US & World