Specialists in disease outbreaks acknowledge that unscientific, community-level information can be valuable. For example, when a parasite slipped through Milwaukee's water treatment system in 1993, the first sign of trouble came in reports to city health officials that drugstores were selling out of diarrhea medicines.
But some public health experts say it's not possible to draw firm conclusions from online tools or reports from companies like Veratect.
"They are considered interesting, unofficial, instructive, imaginative, and then I would go back and emphasize unofficial," said Dr. William Schaffner, a public health expert at Vanderbilt University and a spokesman for the Infectious Disease Society of America.
Dr. Scott Dowell, who heads the CDC's international swine flu team, said the agency looks at reports from Veratect and other companies in the course of monitoring outbreaks around the world. Veratect is often useful, Dowell said, and can be very sensitive to emerging threats.
"It also generates a lot of noise," he said.
Others add that it's risky to act on early signals. Without positive lab tests, reports of new cases are unreliable, in part because mystery illnesses prompt uninfected people to think they have the symptoms.
Even now, when some of Veratect's findings appear to be bearing fruit, the focus on La Gloria as a disease epicenter may turn out to be off-base.
Dr. Philip Brachman, an Emory University professor who for years led the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service, said the scapegoating of the pig farm Veratect detected might stem from an existing local grudge.
"The town probably doesn't like the pig farm," Brachman said, "because of the odor."
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AP Medical Writers Mike Stobbe in Atlanta and Marilynn Marchione in Chicago contributed to this report.
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