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Whooping cough first sickened the Illinois high school cheerleaders, then it struck the football players, the cross-country team and the band.

As it spread within the Chicago suburb of McHenry County in late 2011, another outbreak took place -- on social media. A small business called Sickweather LLC said it detected the online flare-up on Twitter Inc. (TWTR) and Facebook Inc. (FB) postings in early October that year. Thats about two weeks before local health officials issued a public statement.

Now, U.S. agencies want to expand their use of social media to spot potential biological attacks and outbreaks of deadly infectious diseases, including the new H7N9 avian flu that has killed dozens of people in China.

Thats the Holy Grail, said Mark Dredze, an assistant research professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a Sickweather adviser. Wed love these systems to tell us theres a brand new disease and its going to be a big thing.

The online disease trackers have had mixed results, with academics criticizing a tool by Mountain View, California-based Google Inc. (GOOG), the worlds biggest Internet search engine, for overestimating the number of U.S. influenza cases in recent years.

The system, dubbed Google Flu Trends, relied on search terms. It was never intended to be used on its own, said Matt Mohebbi, a former company engineer who helped create the tool.

Kelly Mason, a Google spokeswoman, said the company is open to feedback on how it can refine Flu Trends to help estimate influenza levels and complement existing surveillance systems.

Companies such as Sickweather and Boston-based Epidemico Inc. are trying to get past the noise on the Internet. They rely on computer algorithms to scan social media and news articles for references to disease like whooping cough. They try to screen out unrelated posts that might use sick (when they mean cool or insane) or Bieber fever (obsessed with pop star Justin Bieber).

The work also involves humans, in case the filters dont catch everything and the algorithms exaggerate illness reports.

The big advantage of social media is you can get a lot more data, and you can get it more quickly and more economically, said Henry Niman, a biomedical researcher and president of Pittsburgh-based Recombinomics Inc., which analyzes viral evolution and the spread of disease. It is a matter of fine-tuning that data so you come up with results that are more reliable.

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Disease Outbreak Warnings Via Social Media Sought by U.S.