Twitter and your health

No comments // Jan 10th, 2012 // Social Media

Next time someone tells you that you are spending way too much time on Twitter, just let them you could save their life one day. Health providers have suspected for some time that social media might be an early indicator of an epidemic. Now they have proof.
In particular, a new report shows that Twitter provided an early account of the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti. According to the study published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Internet news and social media were faster transmitters of information in tracking the cholera epidemic in Haiti than health officials. The tweets provided information that health officials wouldn’t report until two weeks later.

“We can definitely use these sources to get early information about how a disease is spreading, and consequently help inform control or response efforts sooner,” says the report’s lead author, Rumi Chunara, Ph.D.

Chunara and the other two authors of the study, Dr. Jason R. Andrews, MD, and John S. Brownstein, Ph.D., determined sites like Twitter can help doctors and epidemiologists pinpoint the speed at which epidemics grow.

“One of the great benefits of these novel data streams is that they are available in real time,” Chunara says.

The next step, she said, would be determining how to utilize real-time data concurrently, or even prospectively, to control outbreaks.

To conduct the study, the researchers created a timeline by searching for the term cholera and the #cholera hashtag on Twitter from Oct. 20 to Nov. 3, 2010. In the two weeks before health officials reported the outbreak, 65,728 tweets with the word “cholera” were posted on Twitter.

Could this be the future we are headed to? Social Media to not only advise the officials but the general public in real-time of potential health threats.

Links of Interest:

ALB Web Design - IOS5 & Twitter
ALB Web Design - Welcome to Your New Personal Assistant – Siri
Mashable – Twitter Revealed Epidemic Two Weeks Before Health Officials
Mashable – How Twitter Tracks the Spread of Disease in Real Time