In 2006, Dr. Larry Brilliant - Google.org's Chief Philanthropic Evangelist - won the prestigious TED Prize. He delivered a powerful talk that highlighted the risk of a devastating future pandemic, and described one of his big ideas for combating the threat. His mantra of 'Early Detection, Early Response' inspired other groups such as InSTEDD, who recently launched a suite of open-source applications to allow collaboration between first responders during disease outbreaks and disasters, and the team behind Google Flu Trends.

Now, this important theme has been revisited at TED by Dr. Nathan Wolfe, founder of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (GVFI), a new non-profit funded by Google.org and the Skoll Foundation. Dr Wolfe's rousing message is that when it comes to pandemics, early detection in humans isn't early enough. We know that 75% of new human diseases begin in animals – so to discover a pandemic before it devastates the human population, we need to catch new viruses when they take the very first leap from animals into humans.

This mission has taken the GVFI team into some remote and difficult locations, from the jungles of Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo (profiled on CNN's Planet in Peril), to the wet markets of China and Malaysia. Here, they collect blood samples from animals and the humans with whom they're in contact, in order to analyse them for evidence of early viral crossover.

You can hear more about this important work and some of GVFI's exciting viral discoveries by watching Dr Wolfe's talk at TED. Pass this on, and help spread ideas, not diseases!

Posted by Joanne Stevens, Associate, Google.org

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An interesting article making a case for the use of online information for earlier detection of disease outbreaks came out last week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. The article, co-authored by HealthMap co-founder and Google.org grantee John Brownstein, looks at an outbreak of listeriosis in Canada and compares online search trends, news reports, and diagnosed case counts during the outbreak period.

Listeriosis is a bacterial infection often caused by contaminated food. The outbreak in Canada killed about 20 people last summer. By using Google Insights for Search data combined with HealthMap's news surveillance data, the authors discovered that a specific search query provided even earlier indication of the outbreak than news reports.

So, what was that key search term that gave the earliest indication of the outbreak? Listeriosis. That's right, when the researchers looked at trends for people searching online for the technical term "Listeriosis," they discovered that the peak of the search trend for that term was the same as the actual peak of medically diagnosed Listeriosis cases. The increase in online searches for "Listeriosis" began in mid-July, one month before the federal announcement that an outbreak was underway in Canada. This means that people diagnosed with Listeriosis, or others close to them, were likely to be the ones searching for that term online at the time of diagnosis, causing a spike.

In contrast, search trends for "Listeria," the term used in the public announcement about the outbreak, peaked around the time of the announcement and other news reports in mid-August. Thus, people searching for "Listeria" were probably doing so in response to the press about the outbreak, not because they'd been diagnosed.

Early detection is critical to helping health officials respond more quickly. While documenting the potential for using online info for earlier outbreak detection, the authors also recognize the challenges. This seems to be the tip of the iceberg for research in this area, and it has others talking too - check out the Wall Street Journal blog which calls this "a wonkier example of Google Flu Trends."

Posted by Corrie Conrad, Google.org

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Solar energy has long been touted as a clean alternative to traditional electricity generation, but building a clean energy economy will also create jobs. Thanks to federal and state policies to support renewable energy, it's estimated that the solar industry will create hundreds of thousands of green jobs in coming years. Based on a study by Navigant Consulting, and with the help of Google.org and Google Earth Outreach, our friends at the Solar Energy Research Education Foundation (SEREF) have developed a U.S. solar jobs map in Google Earth. You can also view this as a KML in Google Earth.

The U.S. solar industry is expected to support more than 440,000 permanent, full-time jobs, including many in the manufacturing and construction industry, by the year 2016. The solar jobs growth layer shows where these jobs are likely to be created across the country. You'll see that many of these jobs are being created in states that have experienced the worst of the current economic crisis, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio.

Clicking on the solar icon in each state shows annual job growth over an eight year period, as well as how the three most common solar technologies—photovoltaics, concentrating solar power, and solar water heating—stack-up in terms of job creation.

In addition to exploring the job growth numbers, you can view a 3-D simulation of the job growth over time and compare the solar energy resources of each state with their job growth potential. In the additional data, you can also see solar installations, like photovoltaic panels and solar water heating at the Georgia Tech Aquatic Center in Atlanta and a solar power tower at the Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) in Southern California, to see what they actually look like in Google Earth.


Because predicting job creation in the future relies on advanced economic modeling, it can be difficult to predict where all the solar jobs will be created. Nearly 30,000 jobs will likely be created across the other 29 states that aren’t explicitly covered in this map. That means solar energy truly is capable of creating a green economy for the entire U.S.

This map was created as part of SEREF’s and Google.org’s shared objective to rapidly scale-up the use of solar technologies in the U.S. so that the environmental, economic, and national security benefits of renewables can be realized.

To check out the map and learn more about solar energy, please visit the solar jobs map site.

Posted by Dave Bercovich, Google.org and Karin Tuxen-Bettman, Google Earth Outreach

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