HOWTO: Houston Flu

The City of Houston has a resource dedicated to information about the H1N1 and seasonal flu viruses, including a list of places where the vaccines (shot and spray) are available at no charge. Google has a map facility where you can put in your zip code and find commercial sites which have stocked, are stocking, and will stock the various vaccines. Houston ISD is opening campuses to provide vaccines this weekend; check back because they're likely to continue the program for a while.

And finally, Google Trends is predicting flu severity by tracking geographically-identified searches for flu related terms. Their methodology is interesting; they basically look for search terms whose temporal frequency matched historical outbreak data from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) for particular locations, and then use those terms to predict forward what CDC trends will be based on current searches. It's an interesting approach, especially since CDC data is only available after a lag of two weeks or so. It's just a correlation, and may be useful to provide earlier warning of outbreak. But it all depends on how well current and future search terms match ones used in the past, and depends on how representative Google searchers are of the population, etc. YMMV.

Stay healthy and safe this flu season!