In conclusion, Google Flu Trends may make a useful contribution to public health given the timeliness of the data and its close association with traditional US ILI surveillance system data. However, CDC ILI Surveillance and positive influenza tests were more correlated during the five years of this study, including the unusual 2003-04 influenza season, than were Google Flu Trends and positive influenza tests. We hypothesize that differences in internet search behavior, patient health care seeking behavior, and physician testing practices may alter the correlation between influenza surveillance systems. In the absence of influenza virologic surveillance, sentinel surveillance for ILI may more accurately monitor influenza activity than Google Flu Trends during anomalous influenza seasons. Furthermore, given the non-specific nature of ILI, robust nationwide virologic surveillance remains critical to the understanding of influenza activity during inter-pandemic and pandemic periods alike.  Monitoring the Systemic Human Memory B Cell Compartment of Melanoma Patients for Anti-Tumor IgG Antibodies Melanoma, a potentially lethal skin cancer, is widely thought to be immunogenic in nature. While there has been much focus on T cell-mediated immune responses, limited knowledge exists on the role of mature B cells. We describe an approach, including a cell-based ELISA, to evaluate mature IgG antibody responses to melanoma from human peripheral blood B cells. We observed a significant increase in antibody responses from melanoma patients (n = 10) to primary and metastatic melanoma cells compared to healthy volunteers (n = 10) (P<0.0001). Interestingly, we detected a significant reduction in antibody responses to melanoma with advancing disease stage in our patient cohort (n = 21) (P<0.0001). Overall, 28% of melanoma patient-derived B cell cultures (n = 1,800) compared to 2% of cultures from healthy controls (n = 600) produced antibodies that recognized melanoma cells. Lastly, a patient-derived melanoma-specific monoclonal antibody was selected for further study. This antibody effectively killed melanoma cells in vitro via antibody-mediated cellular cytotoxicity. These data demonstrate the presence of a mature systemic B cell response in melanoma patients, which is reduced with disease progression, adding to previous reports of tumor-reactive antibodies in patient sera, and suggesting the merit of future work to elucidate the clinical relevance of activating humoral immune responses to cancer. Malignant melanoma, the most fatal form of skin cancer, arises from malignantly-transformed melanocytes in the basal layer of the epidermis. The incidence of melanoma has been increasing at an accelerated rate in the past few decades amongst fair skinned populations [1] and advanced forms of the disease are highly resistant to treatment [2, 3] . Thus, an urgent need exists for novel therapies and earlier diagnosis.