Mining Social Media and Web Searches For Disease Detection

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

Online forums and advances in information technology have resulted in new methods and opportunities for understanding the spread of infectious disease. Whereas previous public health systems suffered from the information lag associated with reliance upon bureaucratic hierarchies, new web-based platforms promise increased opportunities for more timely and accurate information dissemination and analysis. Public health officials will increasingly rely upon intuitive GIS-generated models based upon aggregated data from the web to analyse the spread of infectious disease. Further studies are needed to determine the accuracy of blogger statements as increases in public participation may not necessarily mean the information provided is more accurate.