Google begins tracking swine flu in Mexico

Google Inc. is running an experiment of sorts to follow the swine flu's path through Mexico.

The company is trying to compile information from swine flu-related Google searches in Mexico to map out how the disease is spreading through the country.

The Mexican effort is based on Google officials said that they had found a connection between people searching for flu information and the number of people who actually have the flu in any given area. "Google Flu Trends may be able to detect influenza outbreaks earlier than other systems because it estimates flu activity in near real time," said Jeremy Ginsberg, one of the engineers on the Google Flu Trends project, during a press conference Wednesday.

Ginsberg acknowledged that the new effort, dubbed Experimental Flu Trends for Mexico">Experimental Flu Trends for Mexico, may produce somewhat faulty data due to the lack of available current information from the Mexican government.

"While we would prefer to validate this data and improve its accuracy, we decided to release an early version today so that it might help public health officials and concerned individuals get an up-to-date picture of the ongoing swine flu outbreak," said Ginsberg in a blog post that went up today, as well. "Our current estimates of flu activity in the U.S. are still generally low as would be expected given the relatively low confirmed swine flu case count. However, we'll be keeping an eye on the data to look for any spike in activity."

The swine flu has been spreading - and spreading fear - across the world in recent days.

Wednesday, the World Health Organization raised its pandemic alert from four to five, the second-highest level. CNN.com reported that Dr. Margaret Chan, the U.N. agency's director-general, said the decision means that all countries should "immediately" activate pandemic preparedness plans.

Swine flu, a highly contagious respiratory disease, has a mortality rate of between 1% and 4%, according to the World Health Organization. While initially spread into humans by contact with pigs, the virus then mutates and spreads human to human.

As of 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday, the Washington Post was reporting that the U.S. had 91 confirmed cases of swine flu, while there have been 367 confirmed cases in Mexico and nearly 500 across the world.