Flu

Help Dr Rob find if school absence data can detect flu peaks early. Get your students to analyse your school’s absence data and report on their findings.
We are looking for secondary schools in England and Wales to take part. The project starts in October 2012. You can get started now. [THIS IS NOW CLOSED]

What’s involved?

1. Get started and get consent from your headteacher

[THIS IS NOW CLOSED]

2. Collect and analyse your school’s absence data

[THIS IS NOW CLOSED]

3. Report your findings to Dr Rob and the UCL team

[THIS IS NOW CLOSED]

Took part in 2011/12?

We ran this project over last winter. One of the reasons for doing the project was to show students that science doesn’t always produce a nice staight line or smooth curve. Or indeed that sometimes it doesn’t work at all! Last year saw the lowest incidence of flu on record and whilst we learnt about baseline levels of absence we didn’t see enough flu to justify publishing a paper. A second winter without significant levels of flu would be unprecendented so we are running the project again in the expectation that this time we will collect and analyse enough data. Read about what else has changed here.

About the graph

The graph shows the data we collected over the winter of 2011/12.

• National Influenza Like Illness: The number of individuals across England and Wales going to see their General Practitioner with Influenza Like Illness (per 100,000 of the population). This is data collected by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) and is one of the best indicators for flu activity (read more about it here).
• Days missed due to illness: National school data showing the number of days missed due to illness (per 100 students).

You can keep up to date with Decipher my data! and the Flu! project by following us on twitter @deciphermydata and watch out for tweets marked #IASdata.