Now, to preface this, let me remind you that the Dallas Morning News has run some pretty...um...misleading articles about things in the past ; Now they're trying to say that googlesearches can track flu patterns:
Google searches indicate flu hitting Texas harder than most states
03:24 PM CST on Friday, January 2, 2009
By DAN X. McGRAW / The Dallas Morning News
dmcgraw@dallasnews.comTexans are apparently sniffling more than most.
Google Flu Trends, which tracks searches for flu-related symptoms, indicates that Texas is now one of 10 states that have moderate levels of flu activity. The rest of the nation is in the low category.
The site tracks searches for things like sore throats, fevers and coughs and uses the location of the queries to compare the data with historical baseline flu data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The site then marks each state's flu activity as minimal, low, moderate, high, or intense.Google Flu Trends claims to offer reports of regional flu outbreaks more quickly than the CDC, which often has time lags behind doctor’s visits. The flu reports often mirror those later released by the CDC, according to the site.
Other states with moderate activity include Florida, California and Maryland.
Ok, now, here's a little excerpt from the wikipedia page on "hysterical contagion" (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysterical_contagion):
"Hysterical contagion occurs when a group of people show signs of a physical problem or illness, when in reality there are psychological and social forces at work.
Hysterical contagion is a strong form of social contagion, which describes the copycat effect of imitative behaviour based on the power of suggestion and word of mouth influence..."
And so, if the chemtrails or allergies are causing your sore throat and cough, and you look it up on google, and they track that AS THE FLU, how do we know if it's really accurate? They say their results "mirror" the CDC's, but they don't really show proof...
