Twitter can predict epidemics before doctors
Recently, a sufficient number of experiments have been conducted with social networks of various kinds. They put and the developers of the services themselves, and people who are quite far from IT. A few days ago, the results of an interesting study on predicting the cholera epidemic in Haiti for 2010 were published. In order to conduct a study, doctors analyzed the tweets of users with #cholera tags or with the word cholera.
As it turned out, two weeks before the epidemic was announced by officials, on Twitter, the word “cholera” was mentioned 65,000 times. In addition, the authors of the study used information from the HealthMap service, which shows various kinds of health trends in different regions of the world. Based on the information received, scientists have concluded that an epidemic outbreak of cholera is occurring in Haiti.
As it turned out, this is true. During the epidemic, cholera infected about 520,000 Haitians, of whom 7,000 died.
')
As for Twitter, users' messages with the content of a certain word still need to be “filtered”. So, back in 2009, when doctors announced swine flu, on Twitter the number of messages with the words “swine flu” was very high at the beginning of the “epidemic” (until now, doctors argue whether this epidemic was a general epidemic). After influenza cases became more frequent, conversations on Twitter subsided. So for reliable work with statistical information from social networks, it is necessary to check with official data.
In any case, Twitter and other social resources help to detect outbreaks of various kinds of diseases, and working with social resources does not require large expenditures or a huge staff.
Via mashable
As it turned out, two weeks before the epidemic was announced by officials, on Twitter, the word “cholera” was mentioned 65,000 times. In addition, the authors of the study used information from the HealthMap service, which shows various kinds of health trends in different regions of the world. Based on the information received, scientists have concluded that an epidemic outbreak of cholera is occurring in Haiti.
As it turned out, this is true. During the epidemic, cholera infected about 520,000 Haitians, of whom 7,000 died.
')
As for Twitter, users' messages with the content of a certain word still need to be “filtered”. So, back in 2009, when doctors announced swine flu, on Twitter the number of messages with the words “swine flu” was very high at the beginning of the “epidemic” (until now, doctors argue whether this epidemic was a general epidemic). After influenza cases became more frequent, conversations on Twitter subsided. So for reliable work with statistical information from social networks, it is necessary to check with official data.
In any case, Twitter and other social resources help to detect outbreaks of various kinds of diseases, and working with social resources does not require large expenditures or a huge staff.
Via mashable
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/136001/
All Articles