#salmonella — tracking foodborne illness with social media

Social media use is booming, and buried among the selfies and Instagrammed food porn, statisticians are beginning to find insightful information that could help improve public safety.

At the 2015 Joint Statistical Meetings in Seattle, biostatistician Elaine Nsoesie presented a method for tracking foodborne illness and disease outbreaks using social media sites such as Twitter and business review sites such as Yelp.

Her study, ‘Digital Surveillance of Foodborne Illnesses and Outbreaks’, set out to assess whether crowdsourcing via online reviews of restaurants and other foodservice institutions could be used as a surveillance tool to augment the efforts of local public health departments. She said that traditional methods of data gathering capture only a fraction of the estimated 48 million foodborne illness cases in the US each year, primarily because they rely on affected individuals seeking medical care or reporting their condition to the appropriate authorities.

Nsoesie’s results showed foods such as poultry, leafy lettuce and molluscs, which were implicated in foodborne illness reports on Yelp, were similar to those reported in outbreak reports issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Online reviews of foodservice businesses offer a unique resource for disease surveillance. Similar to notification or complaint systems, reports of foodborne illness on review sites could serve as early indicators of foodborne disease outbreaks and spur investigation by local health authorities. Information gleaned from such novel data streams could aid traditional surveillance systems in near-real-time monitoring of foodborne-related illnesses,” said Nsoesie.

Nsoesie said that Yelp data could be combined with additional data from other social media sites and crowdsourced websites to further improve coverage of foodborne disease reports.