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Craig Hedberg
<p>Craig Hedberg</p>

Social media offers opportunity to detect illness outbreaks

Public health expert sees possibilities in monitoring Twitter, Facebook, Yelp

Health authorities see mining social media as a possible tool in the early detection of food-borne illness outbreaks.

“In theory, social media works just like other complaint systems: People are sick. They talk about it in their social media networks. And then that information can get right to the health department without going through all these other filters that take time to go through,” Craig Hedberg, professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health, said in a presentation Monday.

Hedberg, who discussed the new frontiers of disease-surveillance technology at Nation's Restaurant News' 10th annual Food Safety Symposium, held this week in Newport, R.I., and sponsored by Ecolab, said social media networks like Twitter and Facebook, and restaurant review websites like Yelp, hold potential for early identification of illness outbreaks.

Several studies have looked at ways health experts can tap into public social conversations to identify illness outbreaks, and Hedberg said there is “credible evidence” that such monitoring could be an effective tool.
 
“There is a lot of interesting right now in mining things like Twitter and Facebook to find this kind of discussion going on to identify what is out there before the complaints actually get realized and submitted to the health department,” he said.

However, Hedberg noted that the tremendous amounts of information flowing through social media channels can produce a signal-to-noise ratio that's “quite large.”

Hedberg cited several studies over the past few years that have attempted to use the information effectively. A study between 2012 and 2013 that mined 294,000 Yelp reviews found three outbreaks that were not reported.

“Everybody is very interested in developing automated algorithms to do all this filtering for us to generate signals that could be fed into the health department,” Hedberg said. “This is undoubtedly something that will be going on for some time.”

For now, he added, “We would be better served by trying to get these people who already recognized that they are part of an outbreak to report that directly to the health department rather than just stew about it in a social network.”

One partnership is working to do that, he said, FoodBorneChicago is an online health complaint system that sends tweets to Twitter users who have expressed some level of possible food-borne illness in that city. The system is a partnership between the Smart Chicago Collaborative and the City of Chicago’s Department of Public Health.

In a 10-month period, FoodBorneChicago’s team responded to 270 tweets, Hedberg said. That period produced 193 complaints submitted to FoodBorneChicago. Of those, 133 restaurants were inspected, with 16 percent resulting in a failed inspection.

“There is information moving through these social media networks, and we don’t have really effective tools right now for getting that information into our public health system, but there are several different pathways to go down to see the most effective way,” Hedberg said.

FoodBorneChicago notes on its website that the Centers for Disease Control estimates that about 45 percent of food-borne illnesses go unreported. “The average resident may be unaware that they can file a complaint, much less how to file a complaint,” it says.

Another study was conducted by the University of Rochester, which created a system called nEmesis (“emesis” is the clinical term for “the action or presence of vomiting”) and applied in New York City with the geo-locating abilities of smartphones.

The university researchers’ nEmesis system combines machine learning and crowdsourcing to analyze millions of tweets. In a four-month period, the system collected 3.8 million tweets from more than 94,000 unique users in New York City, traced 23,000 restaurant visitors and mined 480 reports of possible food poisoning.

“If this type of approach could actually be developed, it would a very powerful tool for us,” Hedberg said.

These tools will only improve public health “if we have the resources to use them in the proper way,” he said.

Contact Ron Ruggless at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @RonRuggless

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