Can Users Search Trends Predict People Scares or Disease Breakout? An Examination of Infectious Skin Diseases in the United States

Abstract

Background: In health and medicine, people heavily use the Internet to search for information about symptoms, diseases, and treatments. As such, the Internet information can simulate expert medical doctors, pharmacists, and other health care providers. Aim: This article aims to evaluate a dataset of search terms to determine whether search queries and terms can be used to reliably predict skin disease breakouts. Furthermore, the authors propose and evaluate a model to decide when to declare a particular month as Epidemic at the US national level. Methods: A Model was designed to distinguish a breakout in skin diseases based on the number of monthly discovered cases. To apply this model, the authors correlated Google Trends of popular search terms with monthly reported Rubella and Measles cases from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Regressions and decision trees were used to determine the impact of different terms to trigger the occurrence of epidemic classes. Results: Results showed that the volume of search keywords for Rubella and Measles rises when the volume of those reported diseases rises. Results also implied that the overall process was successful and should be repeated with other diseases. Such process can trigger different actions or activities to be taken when a certain month is declared as “Epidemic.” Furthermore, this research has shown great interest for vaccination against Measles and Rubella. Conclusions: The findings suggest that the search queries and keyword trends can be truly reliable to be used for the prediction of disease outbreaks and some other related knowledge extraction applications. Also search-term surveillance can provide an additional tool for infectious disease surveillance. Future research needs to re-apply the model used in this article, and researchers need to question whether characterizing the epidemiology of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic waves in United States can be done through search queries and keyword trends.