You’re aching, you’re shivering, you’re coughing. You’re definitely, miserably sick, but is this real, potentially serious flu or just some garden-variety winter crud?
Better find out. You pull your handy-dandy virus test kit from the shelf, insert the nasal swab gently into your nostril and twist it around three times to coat it with your (copious) mucus. You swish the swab in liquid and deposit drops of your germy mix on the four wells of the instant test. Ten minutes later — voila. Sure enough, you test positive for an influenza type A. You call your doctor to ask about anti-viral meds, and — as a good citizen of your disease-tracking community — you go online to report your diagnosis to Flu Near You. On its map, you see that you’re not alone: a dozen of your neighbors have the same bug.
Futuristic? Not if you live in the Boston area and are part of a new flu-tracking experiment funded by the National Science Foundation, called GoViral. Run by researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital, the three-year project is just getting under way now, as this year’s flu season takes on steam.
Flu is more than a nuisance. It’s a serious threat — infecting tens of millions of Americans a year and killing an average of 24,000 — and public health types try hard to track and understand it. The CDC monitors reports from doctors’ offices, including lab test results. Google Flu Trends watches online searches for telltale symptoms. Flu Near You, where GoViral is based, already brings together thousands of volunteer sentinels who report online when they have symptoms. Now, GoViral will take testing into the home, where many flu patients hole up rather than seeing the doctor.
“It’s never been done before, to give a lot of people in their homes these tests,” said Dr. Rumi Chunara, GoViral’s lead researcher. “This is the first time that we’re actually crowdsourcing diagnostic samples from people.”
The project breaks new ground in flu tracking, said Dr. Lyn Finelli, who leads flu surveillance and response at the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC: “This is the first time that I know of that anybody has used what we call participatory surveillance,” she said, “where people indicate whether they’re well or ill, and participate in home testing and send the tests in. This is a very novel look at a surveillance system and home testing.”
Dr. Chunara plans to distribute several hundred free flu test kits to Boston-area members of the public who sign up (here) this winter, and expand to encompass more areas next year. The kits include the rapid test, which can only check for four common viruses but gives an instant answer, and also a saliva test that must be sent in to a laboratory and can reliably detect 20 common viruses (though you may be better by the time you get the result.) Continue reading