Monitoring OTC drug sales for early detection of respiratory infectious disease outbreaks
Junjie Li, Chen Wu, Kui Liu, Qinbao Lu, Xinyi Wang, Zheyuan Ding, Tianying Fu, Xuefeng Jiang, Haocheng Wu · 2025
Read Monitoring OTC drug sales for early detection of respiratory infectious disease outbreaks by Junjie Li, Chen Wu, Kui Liu, Qinbao Lu, Xinyi Wang, Zheyuan Ding, Tianying Fu, Xuefeng Jiang, Haocheng Wu (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-12741107.txt.
Description
Junjie Li and co-authors test in 2025 whether sales of over the counter drugs can warn of coming lung infection outbreaks. They track weekly sales in Pinghu City from 2022 to 2024.
Five drug groups tied to fever and breathing illness were matched against weekly case counts from a local hospital. All five rose and fell with the case counts, with peaks in winter and spring. The link held even when sales came one or two weeks before the cases. A simple tree model that joined cough drugs and flu drugs predicted outbreak weeks with strong accuracy. The authors see shop sales as a useful early signal.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Junjie Li, Chen Wu, Kui Liu, Qinbao Lu, Xinyi Wang, Zheyuan Ding, Tianying Fu, Xuefeng Jiang, Haocheng Wu |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 26 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |