Google may have been able to track early warning signs of the developing swine flu outbreak, according to Wired Science,  if the company had known where to look.  Tracking and mapping internet search trends has the promising potential to help us collectively  prepare for and hopefully circumvent health risks, but as I mentioned yesterday, we need to demand more thorough and agressive investigations.   Wired points out that a pre-media-blitz bump in flu-related search terms appeared when the Center for Disease Control and Prevention asked Google to look back at data from Mexico.  The results from Google.org’s Flu Trends indicate that people were looking up terms such as “influenza + phlegm + coughing” months before the recent cases made headlines, and out of synch with typical seasonal flu trends.  And while the correlation between searches and actual reported cases of influenza isn’t an exact science, given the proximity of the trends in hindsight, we can assume that more rigorous examination could help predict future flu outbreaks.

Hopefully tools such as Google.org’s Flu Trends or the EPA’s new map will help create digital safety nets and allow for quicker detection of health and environmental risks.  Utilizing these participatory aproaches, we can also demand greater accountability from government agencies and corporations when we have the data on our side.

To learn more about the connection between the swine flu outbreak and factory farming, check out David Kirby’s analysis on the Huffington Post. And to understand more about how influenza strains are created and how cross species transmission take place, check out this video from Discovery Health.