Complaining on social networks about being sick might annoy your friends and followers , but it can be useful for tools that track the spread of illnesses . A new method for filtering tweets , developed by researchers at Johns Hopkins University , could make the real-time data pouring in more accurate . The United States is in the middle of one of its most severe flu seasons in years . Tech companies , universities and health organizations are harnessing the wealth of data from social networks and search engines , in addition to the usual reports from vital statics offices , hospitals , doctors and public health departments , to keep the public informed and better prepare public health workers . The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention releases a weekly influenza update for the United States that includes stats on people with flu-like symptoms , hospitalizations and deaths . But the detailed information is about two weeks old by the time it comes out . `` There are a lot of gaps in the system that Twitter can fill , '' said assistant research professor Mark Dredze , who headed up the Johns Hopkins project . Real-time information like tweets are becoming a popular source of public health information . They can be used to do more than just track outbreaks . Dredze 's goal is to get ahead of the curve and actually predict where and when illnesses will spread . This information could be invaluable for public health departments , providing them advanced warnings and time to plan with additional doctors , hospital beds or school closings . Thanks to GPS information for each tweet , the location information gathered from Twitter is more finely detailed than the CDC . Early warnings are good for regular people as well . They push people to get vaccinated before they catch the flu , and individuals with health issues who might be more vulnerable can take extra precautions . With an average 340 million tweets a day , Twitter is a firehouse of muddled and misleading information . Taken at face value , keywords would indicate the entire country is suffering from an ongoing fever epidemic of the Bieber variety . Much of the running commentary on Twitter is a reaction to news events , so when a flu epidemic becomes a national news story , the number of people talking about it spikes , regardless of their own health status . `` Most people have just focused on the presence of flu . The very simple thing is you look at Twitter and look at the number of people using the world flu or sick everyday , '' said Dredze . `` The problem with that is if you look a little more closely it does n't really work . '' Dredze 's team is using algorithms to correct for these issues , filtering out the noise to isolate the useful information . They were already researching using Twitter to track health issues before this winter 's recent outbreak but quickly changed tracks to focus on the flu . The group plans to share the information it gathers with public health officials . Tracking influenza and other illnesses based on social media is n't new . In a 2011 paper , researchers reported being able to accurately track disease levels for the swine flu outbreak two years earlier by searching for keywords such as flu , vaccine , illness , Tamiflu and pneumonia . The University of Rochester has turned research about predicting the spread of diseases with social media into a web application called Germ Tracker . The colorful interactive map pulls up geo-tagged Tweets that contain keywords related to illness . If you find a tweet that 's clearly mislabeled ( like someone bragging that their new car is `` sick '' ) , click a button to let the app know they 're not actually sick . It also allows self reporting with a slider you can set to Awful , Sick , Yuck , Meh or Good and options to share specific symptoms . Sick Weather is a similar project that can pull from Facebook and Twitter to map and show animations of contagious illnesses such as chicken pox , colds and whooping cough , as well as other issues like allergies , stress and depression . Even as researchers get better at filtering tweets , the social network presents limitations . It is n't an accurate representation of the entire population in terms of age or location . Two of the groups hardest hit by influenza outbreaks , the elderly and children , are the least likely to be live blogging their symptoms . Google 's Flu Trends looks at search terms to create real-time estimates of where the flu is flaring up . Developed in 2009 in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control , the tool digs through massive amounts of search data ( all anonymous ) looking for flu-releated searches around the world and maps out the intensity of outbreaks . `` The advantage of using these social media tools and Google is they 're much faster than the CDC , '' said Michael Paul , a doctoral student working on the Johns Hopkins Twitter research . `` As an early warning , they 're useful to the government when it needs to plan . '' Armchair influenza trackers will still get the most detailed information from weekly reports released by the Centers for Disease Control . The reports dig deep into the data gathered from doctors , hospitals and other health officials to outline things like number of deaths , flu-related hospitalizations and a breakdown of strains . The CDC also has its own simple app called FluView that plots the volume of influenza-like illnesses by state . `` Our job is really to figure out what viruses are going around and what effect they 're having , '' said Lynnette Brammer , an influenza epidemiologist at the CDC . `` It 's more laboratory based ; we try to get as close as we can to the viruses . '' The CDC teams do check tools like the Google Flu Tracker , and Brammer says that while the results do n't always match up , Google is close to the CDC 's own findings most of the time . The CDC has slightly different goals than tech tools that track symptoms in real-time . It 's drilling down to find out what strains are being reported , see if they are close to the current vaccine and if not , determine if the vaccine needs to be changed to include new virus candidates .
Social media information like tweets is being used to map the current flu outbreak . Researchers are working on ways to better filter tweets for accurate real-time predictions . There are apps and tools from the CDC , Google and startups dedicated to tracking the flu .