All of a sudden, Mexico doesn't seem that far away

Another day, another Google map of the spread of swine flu. This one comes courtesy of http://www.guardian.co.uk/ blogger Bobbie Johnson. It shows the intensity of the affected areas and is actually really rather interesting.

Bobbie writes:

Over the past couple of years, those very clever people at Google.org have been trying to build early-warning systems for diseases - by tracking trends in the data that Google sees in order to build up a picture of whether people are succumbing to certain symptoms.
The US data on Flu Trends has been going since last autumn - but now, given the concern over swine flu, they're also mapping information in Mexico with a new, experimental system.
Engineers admit that it's not perfect, but they do think there's something to be learned from the information:
We cannot be fully confident that the data is correct because we don't have enough historical surveillance data for Mexico against which to compare and calibrate our estimates. Although we cannot validate our estimates as we did for Flu Trends for U.S., we have seen that Google users in Mexico also search for flu-related topics when they experience flu-related symptoms. We are cautiously optimistic that the graphs reflect actual flu activity. The system detected an increase in Mexico City before major news coverage.



Take a look at the map below.