A new study finds that during the Great Recession, there were more than 200 million excess Google searches for certain health ailments thought to be stress related, suggesting that health and wealth may be more strongly connected than previously thought.
SFI Omidyar Fellow Ben Althouse, the study’s lead author, says that by monitoring health-related search terms, public health officials might recognize burgeoning epidemics and direct resources to precautionary measures. This technique is quicker, cheaper, and more efficient than traditional survey based methodologies, he adds.
“Many current approaches to public health surveillance are both slow and expensive,” Althouse says. “Internet search queries may be a significantly more precise metric, suggesting precisely when and how the population’s health could be changing.”
The study's co-authors include Althouse's longtime collaborator John W. Ayers of San Diego State University; Mark Dredze, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University; Jon-Patrick Allem, a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine; and Matthew Childers, professor of political science at the University of Georgia. Althouse did the majority of the research while at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Read the paper in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine (January 7, 2014)
Read the SDSU news release (January 7, 2014)
Read the Science 2.0 article (January 8, 2014)
Read the UPI article (January 9, 2014)
Read the article in The Times of London (subscription required)