San Diego State University Researchers Test Twitter as a Flu Surveillance Tool

Twitter is becoming an increasingly accurate surveillance tool for monitoring influenza in U.S. cities, according to a San Diego State study published in the November issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

 
Nearly a dozen researchers at the university collected almost 160,000 tweets containing the keyword “flu” from 11 U.S. cities. The study concluded that “compared to tweet analyses in the previous influenza season, this study demonstrated increased accuracy in using Twitter as a supplementary surveillance tool for influenza as better filtering and classification methods yielded higher correlations for the 2013-2014 influenza season than those found for tweets in the previous influenza season.”
 
Twitter isn’t the first Web platform to be useful for tracking the movement and severity of flu outbreaks. Google discovered search terms can be a good estimate of flu activity, and has made a Flu Trends website presenting current and historic data.
 
“As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer,” Google’s website says.
 
According to the Centers for Disease Control, flu activity, although highly variable, commonly peaks in the U.S. between December and February.
 
This staff report was originally published by TechWire.