Dengue fever occurrence in India, Brazil, Paraguay, Philippines and Singapore using Google trends

Abstract

Background. Dengue is a mosquito-borne disease and its occurrence is a worldwide problem. The health seekers may turn to the Internet based data for possible complications and various therapeutic approaches for the treatment. Therefore, our objective is to identify and characterize the seasonal transition of dengue fever using Google Trends. Methods. This was a cross-sectional study of dengue fever internet searches between 2004 and 2017. The Google was indexed the aggregated web data and ranked based on the search volume with respect to time. The countries selected for the study include India, Brazil, Paraguay, Philippines and Singapore based on the maximum number of cases across world. The selected regions were further classified in to seasonal time points and the relative search volume ranks were categorized to two season variables. Mann–Whitney U test was applied to identify the statistical significance. Results. The summer to monsoon transitions were showed highest number cases beginning from 2004 in the selected regions. Furthermore, dengue searches were peaked in both the seasons of summer and monsoon in selected regions. The analyses of data further revealed that 16.2 % of variation in dengue trends is associated with the time between 2004 and 2017.