Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Mar 5, 2020
Date Accepted: May 20, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Googling for ticks and borreliosis in Germany: A nationwide Google search analysis from 2015 to 2018
ABSTRACT
Background:
Borreliosis is the most frequently transmitted tick-borne disease in Europe. It is difficult to estimate the incidence of tick bites and associated diseases in the German population due to an absence of obligation to register across all 16 federal states of Germany.
Methods:
Google AdWords Keyword Planner was used to identify search terms related to ticks and borreliosis in Germany from January 2015 to December 2018. The search volume data from the identified search terms was assessed using Excel version 15.23. In addition, SPSS version 24.0 was used to calculate the correlation between search volumes, registered cases, and temperature.
Results:
A total of 1,999 tick-related and 542 borreliosis-related search terms were identified, with a total of 209,679,640 Google searches in all 16 German federal states in the period under review. The analysis showed a high correlation between temperature and borreliosis (r= 0.88) and temperature and tick bite (r= 0.83), and a very high correlation between borreliosis and tick bite (r=0.94). Furthermore, a high to very high correlation between Google searches and registered cases in each federal state was observed (Brandenburg r=0.80, Mecklenburg- West Pomerania r= 0.77, Saxony r= 0.74 and Saxony Anhalt r=0.90; all p<0.001). Conclusion: Our study provides insight into annual trends concerning interest into ticks and borreliosis that are relevant to the German population exemplary in the data of a large internet search engine. Public health studies collecting incidence data may benefit from the results indicating a significant correlation between internet search data and incidences of infectious diseases.
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