Crimson Hexagon: 250,000 users in the U.S. contracted the flu in December 2012

If you've had a cold in the past six weeks, based on mentions on Twitter or Facebook, you're not alone.

Since the beginning of December, there have been 626,379 flu-related topics on the two social networking sites, an increase of 2,336% from the previous month, according to Crimson Hexagon's analysis. Flu mentions peaked in early January.

Of those topics, 40 percent of posts included the words “I have the flu.” and had more than 250,000 Twitter or Facebook users.

Another 10% of users also mentioned that their friends or family members had the flu, and this type of information peaked on January 13. The good news is that the mention rate of flu dropped significantly afterwards, and users either recovered or stopped mentioning it.

Based on these data, Twitter seems to be a good platform for venting grievances, with 90% of the messages coming from Twitter. Can social networks help us better predict the outbreak and spread of these epidemics?