Twitter, the popular social networking and microblogging website, could be used as an early warning system for pandemics or epidemics, claim researchers from City University in London.
The experts, who presented their findings to the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Vienna, discovered that three million “tweets” posted between May and December of 2009 contained the word “flu,” according to an April 13 AFP article.
“The numbers of tweets we collected by searching by keywords such as ‘flu’ or ‘influenza’ has been astronomical,” Patty Kostkova, co-author of the study, told the news agency on Tuesday. “What we’re looking at now is, what is the potential of this enormous data set for early warning systems. Because it’s a real time media, it can call for an immediate response if required.”
The City University experts are teaming up with European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and Britain’s National Health Service to help find ways to handle health issues in preparation for the upcoming 2012 London Olympics.
Based on their findings, they believe that Twitter could be a valuable tool to help individuals find nearby emergency medical personnel. By monitoring Twitter trends, they believe health officials can better detect and respond to an epidemic.
That runs contrary to claims made by the World Health Organization (WHO), who on Tuesday said that the Internet had negatively impacted the international response to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic by spreading rumors, criticism and rampant speculation.
Those comments came as a 29-person WHO panel of health experts began meeting in Geneva, investigating the handling of last year’s influenza outbreak. WHO Director-General Margaret Chan is confident that the board will provide an “independent, credible and transparent” review.
“We want to know what worked well. We want to know what went wrong and, ideally, why,” Chan told the review board members, who represent 28 countries, on Monday. “We want to know what can be done better and, ideally, how.”
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