The impact of poor air quality (AQ) on human health is a global issue, with periods of poor AQ known to occur in multiple locations, across different countries at, or around the same time. The Public Health England (PHE) Emergency Department Syndromic Surveillance System (EDSSS) is a public health legacy of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, monitoring anonymised daily attendance data in near real-time from a sentinel network of up to 38 EDs across England and Northern Ireland during 2014.

Today, Internet, especially Wikipedia, is an important part of everyday life. People can notably use this popular free online encyclopedia to search health-related information. Recent studies showed that Wikipedia data can be used to monitor and to forecast influenza-like illnesses in near real time in the United States [1,2].
 We carried out a study to explore whether French Wikipedia data allow to monitor the trends of five seasonal diseases in metropolitan France: influenza-like illness, gastroenteritis, bronchiolitis, chickenpox and asthma.

Objective

Two major heat waves occurred in France in July 2015. A first episode characterized by early onset, intensity, large geographical coverage and duration occurred between 29th of June 8th of July. A second episode less intense was localized on the South-East of the country from 15th to 23rd of July.

While the link between excess winter mortality and winter respiratory diseases in the elderly is well described, the impact of the epidemic of influenza in the elderly is mainly assessed in France through specific surveillance in the general population. Syndromic surveillance data enables to monitor ED attendances and hospitalizations for various diagnostic codes groupings throughout the influenza epidemic, some of which often cited as influenza proxies, such as cardiorespiratory diagnostic groups.