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This year's flu season is particularly intense. The CDC, or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tracks reported outbreaks around the U.S. each year, and its latest report (for the week of Dec. 30 to Jan. 5 — they're always a few weeks old by the time they’re published), the agency ranked nine out of 10 U.S. regions as "Elevated," with 20 confirmed pediatric deaths so far.

 

While the CDC is the most authoritative source around when it comes to viral epidemics, search giant Google has also been doing some cutting edge work tracking flu outbreaks since 2006. They're doing it more indirectly than the CDC, which relies mostly on numbers coming from hospitals and clinics, but Google's method has advantages that the CDC cannot replicate: no entity is connected as intimately with as many people as Google. Every day, they get information from hundreds of millions of people via search keywords, and by cleverly analyzing searches about flu symptoms, they can get a pretty good idea of how many people are sick in different regions.

 

It works: Google's results have been published in the prestigious and peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature. And unlike the CDC's numbers, which take time to collect and compile, Google's flu numbers are real-time, which can help health organization react more effectively. This might seem like a small detail, but it can be a question of life or death for vulnerable individuals.

 

So how sick have Google's users been this flu season? Very sick — and all over the country. As of the middle of January 2013, this is what the data looks like:

 

 

This surpasses in intensity even the very severe 2009 swine flu (H1N1) pandemic. As you can see on the map, flu activity in every single state ranks as "intense" except for four that are "high." You can get an up-to-date version of the data here.

 

There are also other crowd-sourced ways to track the flu. One good example is Flu Near You, a project run by Healthmap of Boston Children’s Hospital in partnership with the American Public Health Association and the Skoll Global Threats Fund. Participants are asked to fill a short weekly survey, and this helps map outbreaks and learn about how the virus propagates.

 

 

While it's great to have such sophisticated sources of information about flu outbreaks on the national and state level, you also need to know what you can do to get through this intense flu season. What are some resources that you can use?

 

The first thing is to make sure you are familiar with the symptoms of the influenza infection. Most people are probably familiar with them, but if you aren't, no worries, we all have to learn things for the first time. Follow this link to familiarize yourself with the list (and you can then take this flu quiz by the CDC to test your knowledge). If you want to dig deeper, this primer on the influenza virus is excellent.

 

Once you know how to spot the virus, in yourself and in others, you need strategies to avoid catching it, especially if you are a vulnerable person, or could then transmit it to someone who is (seniors, infants, people with severe health problems, etc).

 

The most effective way to avoid getting the flu is to get vaccinated for it (see: The truth about getting the flu shot). The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services runs a website named Flu.gov that provides a tool to find places near you with the flu vaccine.

 

Apart from the vaccine, other prevention measures are:

 

 

There are also many other online resources, such as:

 

The Flu F.A.C.T.S. iPhone app, which both helps you track outbreaks and gives you prevention tips and email alerts.

 

The CDC's Flu Twitter account and Facebook account (they also have a Flu Awareness Facebook app).

 

The CDC's FluView mobile app, to keep track of outbreaks across the country.

 

The CDC's Influenza App for Clinicians and Health Care Professionals (for iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch, with Android support coming).

 

And on the lighter side, there's a Facebook app called "Help, My Friend Gave Me the Flu" that tries to pinpoint which of your friends gave you the flu by scanning through their public messages to try to identify who was sick when. What will they come up with next?