A study has suggested that drinking alcohol every day may cut the risk of heart disease in men by more than a third. But the research has come under fire from scientists who say the study is flawed and should not encourage anyone to drink more.
The controversial study found that men who drank moderate, high and very high levels of alcohol had a lower risk of coronary heart disease.
Heavy drinking can damage organs and lead to early death. According to the World Health Organization, 76 million of the estimated 2 billion people in the world who drink alcohol suffer ill health as a result, and alcohol causes around 1.8 million deaths every year.
We all need health insurance. Having a solid health policy in place helps pay for the high medical bills that come with doctor visits, operations, and medicine. Having health insurance can mean the difference between getting treatment but still living comfortably or getting treatment and running out of money.
Our health insurance policies assist you in paying for doctor visits, prescriptions, necessary types of testing, specialist care, and surgical procedures.
We at Headquarter Insurance Group want to provide you with the best health insurance advice and most competitive products available. Whether you’re looking for individual coverage, group coverage for a business, long term care, or any other type of health insurance, we’ll help design an insurance program for you!
We've found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate current flu activity around the world in near real-time.
Each week, millions of users around the world search for health information online. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Insights for Search. But can search query trends provide the basis for an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?
We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together. We compared our query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world. Our results have been published in the journal Nature.
These graphs show historical query-based flu estimates for different countries and regions compared against official influenza surveillance data. As you can see, estimates based on Google search queries about flu are very closely matched to traditional flu activity indicators. Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Our system is still new, but we hope to see similar correlations in the coming years.
So why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? Traditional flu surveillance is very important, but most health agencies focus on a single country or region and only update their estimates once per week. Google Flu Trends is currently available for a number of countries around the world and is updated every day, providing a complement to these existing systems.
Learn more about the research behind Google Flu Trends:
Read the article published by Nature, Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data
Download the Google Flu Trends estimates for the world
For epidemiologists, this is an exciting development, because early detection of a disease outbreak can reduce the number of people affected. If a new strain of influenza virus emerges under certain conditions, a pandemic could ensue with the potential to cause millions of deaths (as happened, for example, in 1918). Our up-to-date influenza estimates may enable public health officials and health professionals to better respond to seasonal epidemics and pandemics.
Experimental Flu Trends
For countries with Experimental Flu Trends, we found aggregated flu-related queries which produced a seasonal curve that suggested actual flu activity. However, these estimates have not been compared with official influenza surveillance data. The experimental estimates are available for download from each Experimental Flu Trends country page. If you are a public health official with ILI data available for one of the experimental countries, please contact us and we will work to validate our estimates against the historic data.
We all need health insurance. Having a solid health policy in place helps pay for the high medical bills that come with doctor visits, operations, and medicine. Having health insurance can mean the difference between getting treatment but still living comfortably or getting treatment and running out of money.
Our health insurance policies assist you in paying for doctor visits, prescriptions, necessary types of testing, specialist care, and surgical procedures.
We at Headquarter Insurance Group want to provide you with the best health insurance advice and most competitive products available. Whether you’re looking for individual coverage, group coverage for a business, long term care, or any other type of health insurance, we’ll help design an insurance program for you!
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