Can Social Media Help Public Health Officials Monitor Disease Outbreaks?

Recent disease outbreaks in the last decade such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARs-CoV) in Asia and the pandemic H1N1/09 influenza virus worldwide have prompted infectious disease scientists to investigate new ways to improve public health surveillance, monitoring the incidence of infectious diseases to understand and minimize their impact. The exchange of health information on the Internet and social media is an obvious opportunity to gain insight into emerging disease events. Now, more than ever, use of electronic data, including new and popular initiatives such as Google Flu Trends, ProMed-mail and HealthMap, are being used to enhance public health preparedness. But how useful are they for public health practitioners who are trying to detect emerging diseases in their own regions?

Now, a new study published in The Milbank Quarterly, focuses on the challenges facing practitioners as they consider ways to integrate social media and Internet data into the detection and management of disease outbreaks. Led by Edward Velasco, PhD, Senior Scientist, and others at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, this systemic review, “Social Media and Internet-Based Data in Global Systems for Public Health Surveillance,” looks at 20 years of published studies about event-based surveillance systems. Members of a national public health institute, the authors’ aim “was to help health policy decision makers decide whether to incorporate new methods into comprehensive programs of surveillance….” While “Internet-based bio-surveillance” or “digital disease detection,” as it is known, has been described and analyzed in the literature, systemic reviews of the field have been few,” writes David M. Hartley, PhD, MPH, Associate Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at Georgetown University Medical Center, who provides commentary on the article in the Quarterly. “It is this intellectual gap that makes the article… so valuable and timely”—and provides “much-needed perspective.”

Click here to download the press release.