Identifying disease outbreaks by analysing social media

Researchers at UCL Statistical Science are working with the Food Standards Agency, to identify disease outbreaks by analysing the text content of public social media messages, treating the social media discussion as a network of words and then relating the network structures to the presence of outbreaks.

Twitter-based Norovirus surveillance:

• The Food Standards Agency is is responsible for protecting public health in relation to food.
• Norovirus is one of the most common food borne illnesses (estimated 600k-1m cases per year in the UK).
• Norovirus outbreak prediction based on network representations of Twitter data