On This Week in Virology episode #9, Vincent and Dick recall the discovery of Lassa virus in Africa in 1969. A non-fictional account of the story, 'Fever', written by John G. Fuller and published in 1974, inspired Vincent to become a virologist. Part of the story took place at Columbia-Presbyterian ...

The article which describes the use of search engine data to predict influenza epidemics, discussed previously on this blog, was published today in the journal Nature. The title of the article is "Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data", and the abstract can be found here.

It was bound to happen: a few days after announcing its flu trends service, Google is under fire from advocacy groups which claim their information gathering violates user privacy. The NY Times has the story today. Google flu isn't new: it uses search data in the same way that it ...

This Week in Virology #8 has been posted at www.microbe.tv/twiv. <span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span>&lt;span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&amp;lt;span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" class="mce_SELRES_start"&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/span&amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;span data-mce-type="bookmark" style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" ...

This is a guest post by Cliff Mintz, Ph.D. of BioJobBlog. No matter what you may think of Google, you gotta love the brilliance and innovative moxy of the guys who run that company. In today's New York Times, there was a story about a new web tool called Google Flu Trends. ...