APHA members challenged to help track influenza cases: Flu Near You debuts

APHA members have the opportunity to be part of work to track the flu over the next year while at the same time competing to win up to $25,000.

APHA Flu Near You Challenge is a partnership between the Association, HealthMap and the Skoll Global Threats Fund to create a nationwide open surveillance system for influenza. The goal is to track cases of influenza in real time, allowing health practitioners to better know when flu is in their area and how widespread it has become.

Announced at APHA’s 139th Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., in October, the Flu Near You Challenge is “an exciting opportunity for the APHA community to engage in a new way of gathering data,” said Susan Polan, PhD, APHA’s associate executive director for public affairs and advocacy.

HealthMap is an online system that tracks emerging public health events via the Web. The system crawls the Internet, looking for clues about disease, and can provide very early evidence of an outbreak, sometimes even before governments are aware of a problem. HealthMap spawned Outbreaks Near Me, an online tool that allows people to report disease events to the system, and Flu Near You was next.

To participate in the challenge, APHA members register at the challenge website, www.aphafluchallenge.org. The goal is to encourage others to sign up to receive weekly email surveys asking about flu symptoms. The questionnaires ask just a few demographic questions and then provide a list of symptoms people can check off if they have experienced them.

“We wanted to start as simply as possible,” said John Brownstein, PhD, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of HealthMap. “We tried as much as possible to keep this to a five-second task each week.”

From left, HealthMap’s John Brownstein, Mark Smolinski of Skoll Global Threats Fund and APHA’s Susan Polan at the APHA Meeting.

Photo courtesy EZ Event Photography

APHA members who are part of the challenge can win up to $25,000, while groups can win up to $50,000. To be eligible for the top awards, individuals must earn credit for at least 10,000 surveys from their users, while groups must earn credit for at least 100,000 surveys.

“The decision to partner with APHA was driven by the desire to take this idea that the public was ready to be directly engaged in surveillance,” said Mark Smolinski, MD, PhD, director for global health threats at the Skoll Global Threats Fund.

Smolinski said he had been considering the idea of engaging the public in surveillance for years and was told that people would not participate or data would not be reliable. But he points to programs in other countries, such as Australia, where a similar flu tracking program has grown to 10,000 users, 90 percent of whom participate every week.

Smolinski said the time is right in part because of the recent film “Contagion,” which portrayed a wide-scale disease outbreak.

“When it became clear that the time was right, that people were having these discussions, we wanted to move forward,” he told The Nation’s Health.

Partnering with APHA and its Get Ready campaign seemed like a good idea, Smolinski said. The Get Ready campaign aims to help Americans prepare for public health emergencies, including natural disasters and emerging infectious diseases. Participating in the Flu Near You effort is a “natural step in the work of the Get Ready campaign,” Polan said.

Smolinski said that the collaboration is a good fit.

“You immediately think about APHA when you think about something as important as a new open surveillance system for flu,” he said.

Smolinski said he has been in close contact with the developers of FluTracking in Australia. Starting in 2006, the system has helped document that communities with high vaccine rates have lower rates of flu. It also allows public health workers to identify pockets of need that can then be used to help prioritize services geographically.

Brownstein said he also sees the Flu Near You challenge as a way to help not just public health workers, but the public at large.

“The more people understand the risk around them, the more likely they are to take on prevention practices,” he said.

Both Smolinski and Brownstein said figuring out how best to track flu could be an important step toward tracking more serious pandemics that emerge.

“We think flu is sort of a great starting point,” Brown- stein told The Nation’s Health. “It helps us see how we might track something that is widespread that impacts tens or hundreds of thousands of people.”

The Flu Near You program allows that tracking and provides feedback to users as well as useful tips, such as where to get a flu shot. The fact that the cash prizes are large will likely attract people to the APHA challenge, Polan said, but those who are not sure they can register thousands should still participate. There will be other prizes and honors available, particularly for people and groups who use innovative ways to get people to register. In fact, the challenge already awarded an iPad during the Annual Meeting.

As of late November, more than 700 members had registered for the challenge, resulting in more than 2,300 surveys. Challenge participants can check an online leaderboard to see which individuals or groups are leading.

For more on the challenge, visit www.aphafluchallenge.org.

• Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association