As Britain braces itself for the arrival of avian influenza from Continental Europe, I thought it would be timely to remind Sciencebase readers of a bird flu FAQ I wrote towards the end of last year to try and separate the facts from the fiction regarding H5N1 and the threat of a global bird flu pandemic.
UPDATE: From Google.org – Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. But can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?
By tracking search trends related to flu, Google now reckons it can predict the spread of the disease.