Heat stroke internet searches can be a new heatwave health warning surveillance indicator.

Tiantian Li,Fan Ding,Yi Zhang,Qinghua Sun,Patrick L Kinney

doi:10.1038/srep37294

Tiantian Li, Fan Ding + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/srep37294

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Abstract

The impact of major heatwave shocks on population morbidity and mortality has become an urgent public health concern. However, Current heatwave warning systems suffer from a lack of validation and an inability to provide accurate health risk warnings in a timely way. Here we conducted a correlation and linear regression analysis to test the relationship between heat stroke internet searches and heat stroke health outcomes in Shanghai, China, during the summer of 2013. We show that the resulting heatstroke index captures much of the variation in heat stroke cases and deaths. The correlation between heat stroke deaths, the search index and the incidence of heat stroke is higher than the correlation with maximum temperature. This study highlights a fast and effective heatwave health warning indicator with potential to be used throughout the world.

Highlights

In current heatwave health warning systems, the prediction of possible health effects is done by modeling the relationship between temperature and health
Most of the temperature and health outcomes are studied using mortality data while few use morbidity data, but the former is not well suited for representing general population health and it still leaves a high level of uncertainty in health risk prediction during heatwaves
The increasing availability of datasets from sources such as social media posts, search engine queries and other internet data have shown the potential for analyzing patterns, trends and social phenomena in a variety of domains including finance[16,17], science[18], tourism[19,20] and health[21,22,23,24]

Summary

Introduction

In current heatwave health warning systems, the prediction of possible health effects is done by modeling the relationship between temperature and health. This method is widely used in epidemiological studies, it has some weaknesses. Most of the temperature and health outcomes are studied using mortality data while few use morbidity data, but the former is not well suited for representing general population health and it still leaves a high level of uncertainty in health risk prediction during heatwaves. We developed and tested a new preliminary surveillance proxy during the heatwave period aimed at addressing the shortcomings of current heatwave health warning surveillance

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