Epidemiologists put social media in the spotlight

Conference debates how to use online data to deliver faster health care.
Katherine Rowland
14 February 2012

Kass-Hout will be arguing his case for greater adoption of these tools on 16 February at the International Conference on Digital Disease Detection at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. The meeting aims to bring together leading figures in technology and epidemiology to discuss how ‘informal data’ such as tweets and texts can radically change disease surveillance.

Not everyone in the public-health community is ready and willing to use the data. Andrea Dugas, a research fellow in emergency medicine at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, says that practitioners regard informal-data tools with “a degree of healthy scepticism”, adding that more research is needed to prove their reliability before they become a core part of public-heath planning.

Is real-time epidemiology just a tweet away?
Another challenge to the field is that recent studies have demonstrated only correlative relationships between informal data and disease incidence. For example, Dugas and her colleagues have shown that internet searches for words relating to influenza, monitored with a web platform called Google Flu Trends, tallies with subsequent hospital visits1. “You see increased search activity and a very short time later, people come to the emergency department,” says study co-author Richard Rothman, an emergency-medicine physician at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

But public-health officials would find such data more useful if they could be used to predict outbreaks, and there is little evidence that these tools can do that consistently and reliably, says Rothman. To address this issue, researchers (including Rothman and Dugas) are planning larger studies to explore how tools such as Twitter and Google Trends, might hold up across different disease types and broader geographical regions to forecast emerging outbreaks.
#Haiticholera

Rumi Chunara, an engineer studying biological sensors at Harvard Medical School, says that informal data should be used as a complement to conventional surveillance, particularly in populations that may have few health resources but plenty of access to mobile phones. Chunara used Twitter-generated data to track the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti2, using data provided by HealthMap, a team based at Children's Hospital Boston that aggregates informal data on diseases around the world to produce an interactive map of emerging outbreaks, and the major sponsor of this week’s conference.

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