Next time you’re experiencing a bad illness, you may want to tweet about it – and not just because your boss may be looking at your Twitter feed to make sure you’re not at the beach. Complaining about not feeling well on Twitter could prove to be more beneficial to your community than you think. In fact, the more specific you are about your symptoms, the better. Imagine you tweeted about an exhausting cough coupled with a severe headache, if people around you tweet that they experience similar symptoms, your town could be experiencing an outbreak.

Developed by ad agency McCann Healthcare Worldwide, the new online service called Kazemill can alert users to the spread of illnesses by keeping track of Twitter activity and looking for specific and relevant tweets hourly. The service claims to be so smart that it can distinguish between someone tweeting an actual symptom and someone just tweeting about not feeling well. The service shows the spread of symptoms that Twitter users complain about on a real-time and color coded map. Developers also hope to see Kazemill become a tool in predicting the spread of colds, flu and other illnesses in a way that a weather channel does.

The service has been tested in Japan with some successful results. Kazemill recorded 18,000 daily mentions of symptoms such as chills, sore throat and runny nose, color-coded them and laid them out on a map according to the location of the person who tweeted the symptom. The map shows not only the spread of illness, but also where there’s a higher concentration of certain symptoms.

I think this is a great use of Twitter – and you can use the service in so many ways. From knowing which vitamins and over-the-counter medicine to stock-up on depending on what kind of illness is going around your city, to planning where to take a vacation. Not to mention, it would make tracking flu virus outbreaks and containing them that much easier.

Kazemill is expected to launch worldwide over the course of the next year.