Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Dermatology
Date Submitted: Nov 17, 2021
Date Accepted: Sep 11, 2022
Date Submitted to PubMed: Aug 26, 2023
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
Worldwide evolution of vaccinable and non-vaccinable viral skin infections: a Google Trends analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
Most common viral skin infections are not reportable conditions. Studying the population dynamics of these viral epidemics using traditional field methods is costly and time consuming, especially over wide geographical areas
Objective:
To explore the evolution, seasonality and distribution of vaccinable and non-vaccinable viral skin infections through analysis of Google Trends.
Methods:
Worldwide search trends from 2004 through May 2021 for viral skin infections were extracted from Google Trends, quantified and analysed.
Results:
Time series decomposition showed that total search term volume for warts, zoster, roseola, measles, hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD), varicella and rubella increased worldwide over the study period while the interest for Pityriasis rosea and herpes simplex decreased. Internet searches for HFMD, varicella and measles exhibited the highest seasonal patterns. The interest for measles and rubella was more pronounced in African countries while the interest for HFMD and roseola was more pronounced in East Asia.
Conclusions:
Harnessing data generated by web searches may increase the timeliness of traditional surveillance systems and strengthens the suspicion that the incidence of some vaccinable viral skin infections such as varicella, measles, rubella may be globally increasing. Clinical Trial: Ethics approval for this type of study was not required as none of the queries in the Google database can be associated with any identity and/or physical location, as specified in Google’s privacy policy (www.google.com/privacypolicy.html).
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