Dengue is a mosquito-borne disease that threatens more than half of the world's population. Despite being endemic to over 100 countries, government-led efforts and mechanisms to timely identify and track the emergence of new infections are still lacking in many affected areas. Multiple methodologies that leverage the use of Internet-based data sources have been proposed as a way to complement dengue surveillance efforts. Among these, the trends in dengue-related Google searches have been shown to correlate with dengue activity. We extend a methodological framework, initially proposed and validated for flu surveillance, to produce near real-time estimates of dengue cases in five countries/regions: Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, Singapore and Taiwan. Our result shows that our modeling framework can be used to improve the tracking of dengue activity in multiple locations around the world.
@article{arxiv.1612.02812,
title = {Advances in using Internet searches to track dengue},
author = {Shihao Yang and S. C. Kou and Fred Lu and John S. Brownstein and Nicholas Brooke and Mauricio Santillana},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1612.02812},
year = {2016}
}