Harvard ‘GoViral’ project will track the flu virus by zipcode

Get your tissue boxes ready: It’s just a few weeks before we hit peak flu. In preparation, a group at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital are testing a novel way to track the virus in real time, and are calling on sniffly and sneezing New Englanders for help. 

“You hear it all the time, the flu is going around. But is it actually in my neighborhood? That’s what matters,” said Rumi Chunara, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, and the chief researcher behind the flu crowdsourcing website GoViral.

Chunara is part of HealthMap, a team at Boston Children’s Hospital that has been building a reputation for their work tracking diseases as they proliferate across the world and the web. Her research has shown that Twitter posts have indicated how the cholera epidemic spread through Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Her colleagues have tracked restaurants that were the origin points for food poisoning through Yelp reviews and are currently tracking the Ebola outbreak by tracking keywords in public data, news reports, and social media.

In a similar way, since 2008, Google Flu Trends has tracked and predicted the incidence of flu from data about where people were logging flu-related queries. But while that method is useful, it has its limits, said Chunara, “We haven’t been able to validate that information ever. We never really know, was it actually flu? What did people have?”

The results from last year’s GoViral study, tracking flu from December last year to April this year.

It turns out a little crowdsourcing can go a long way. Last year, Chunara mailed flu kits to volunteers in Boston with instructions to send in a spit and swab sample when they got sick. This year, Chunara hopes to get feedback from all of New England by gathering swabs from families who live in cities and suburbs and more remote locations as well.

Volunteers can sign up on their website, GoViral, to receive a free flu kit in the mail. The test is only supposed to take a few minutes: spit in a tube, then use the Q-Tip provided to swab your nose. Double seal that, and drop it in the mail. “We pre-paid the postage to make it super simple,” said Chunara.

When Chunara’s group gets the sample, they will analyze it to identify which virus was behind the symptoms, and send the individual their information (along with a recommendation to get to a doctor).

The GoViral biological sample kit.

Scrubbed of personal information, that information will be also added to a map to show flu incidents by zipcode.

Besides better tracking, Chunara said the information can fill in a blindspot in the traditional healthcare rearview. Most of the Boston residents who sent Chunara samples last year did not go see the doctor when they got sick, they told Chunara in a survey.

But more immediately, she hopes the information will help people keep a track of outbreaks in their neighborhood and accordingly take preventative actions to keep themselves healthy.

Image: Flickr user William Brawley

Nidhi Subbaraman writes about science and research. Email her at nidhi.subbaraman@globe.com.
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