Since about 2006 or so, government officials at the HHS (Dept of Health and Human Services) have been monitoring social media for evidence of influenza and pandemic. The idea was to look at search words, and then see if patterns occurred across geographic regions. Such patterns might predict nervous parents hastily looking for symptoms and treatments and perhaps might show a real epidemic (widespread occurance of a disease in a region ) and then pandemic (prevalent disease over an entire nation) was occuring.

As Facebook and Twitter and other (now less popular) sites were growing, they also looked there. In a way, it's really creepy, isn't it?

There's a way you can use the same strategy to look for a pandemic, but not in a way that you might think.

One of the keywords for businesses and economic or weather related disaster is "force majeure". Companies used to say "acts of God", but we live in a post-Christian age, and so "force majeure" is used. If used in a business contract, it's a legal contractual term indicating that a company could "wiggle out" from obligations due to unforeseen events. Then they couldn't be sued for not paying salaries and benefits, delivering supplies per contract, not paying their supplies in kind, etc.
[link to www.out-law.com]

Example: There might be such force majeure clauses in your life or homeowner's insurance policy. Check and see.

If things were really getting bad, a lot of companies would be doing extensive searches of their contracts and that term "force majeure" might start popping up...a lot. You might get a form letter informing you of that clause. Companies might trade those form letters back and forth between vendors and those they supply.

It's one more thing you could be vigilant about. A way to monitor would be to look at Google Trends. You can put in a term and then see over a set time how much it's changed and that is graphed.

Here's an alarming Google Trend for "green mucus". It's going logarithmic.

[link to www.google.com]