Mining Social Media and Web Searches For Disease Detection

Yang, Y. Tony; Horneffer, Michael; DiLisio, Nicole

The increase in public participation in online blogs and forums allows for more accessible and transparent information. Information relating to the emergence or spread of an infectious disease can be accessed from individuals who report personal cases in online forums such as Twitter. The capability to cheaply aggregate, process, and analyse this kind of intelligence is now possible with web-based analytics developed by companies such as Google and Yahoo. 4 The development of web-based social media analytics has given public health officers and physicians an earlier insight into the emergence and spread of infectious diseases. While traditional methods of detection relied predominately on hierarchical or bureaucratic lines of communication, these often failed to yield timely and accurate epidemiological intelligence. 4 Web-based analytics and information processing gives provide health practitioners with the opportunity of consolidating previously inaccessible and disparate information sources. These new sources of analysis and information are intended to complement traditional sources of intelligence about epidemics.