Reports from a research carried out at the University of Illinois at Chicago indicate that Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s Google Searches may come in handy to help in battling the spread of Sexually Transmitted Diseases commonly abbreviated as STDs.
And according to Supriya Mehta told Kaiser, UIC’s epidemiology professor and researcher, there is a lot of information that one can find on Google’s search engine. This could be the simple reason that has led to the partnership between the tech company and the university, a partnership that is expected to modernize STD surveillance.
But how will this happen? Well, researchers will look out for specific search terms and examine them to establish their search popularity. Take for example the Googling of “painful urination”. While this is a symptom of a gonorrhoea, its search popularity will help the doctors and scientists analyse and probably examine the direction the disease is likely to be taking. The frequency of the searchers will also help them forecast on the number of emerging cases.
And when all this is said and done, city to city, state to state, alongside the collection of any other informative data, researchers are hopeful that they will be well prepared to face the sexually transmitted disease head on.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not been left behind either in fighting for the improvement of public health. As such it has sought the authority to access Google’s database with the same aim of protecting the general well-being of the American Population. The move comes after Google’s disease trends senior engineer, Christian Stefansen stating that there is no scarcity of transmissible diseases.
Since 2008 Google has been working towards finding a better way to foretell how these diseases spread and how they can be stooped even before they start. And with Company’s Flu Trends having been shut down earlier in 2015 due to declined accuracy, Google is optimistic that the new look into STD’s will take effect.
Sources: digitaltrends
