TY - JOUR T1 - Wikipedia Usage Estimates Prevalence of Influenza-Like Illness in the United States in Near Real-Time A1 - McIver, David J. A1 - Brownstein, John S. Y1 - 2014/04/17 N2 - Author Summary Although influenza is largely avoidable through vaccination, between 3,000–50,000 deaths occur in the United States each year that are attributed to this disease. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continuously monitor the amount of influenza that is present in the American population and compiles this information in weekly reports. However, because it can take a long time to collect and analyze all of this information, the data that is being reported each week is typically between 1–2 weeks old at the time of publishing. For this reason, we are interested in developing new techniques to determine the amount of influenza in the population that are accurate, can return results in real-time, and can be used to supplement traditional monitoring. We have created a method of estimating the amount of influenza-like illness in the American population, at any time of year, by analyzing the amount of Internet traffic seen on certain influenza-related Wikipedia articles. This method is able to accurately estimate the percentage of Americans with influenza-like illness, in real-time, and is robust to influenza seasons that are more severe than normal and to events that promote much media attention, such as the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. JF - PLOS Computational Biology JA - PLOS Computational Biology VL - 10 IS - 4 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003581 SP - e1003581 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003581 ER -