Can Twitter and Other 'Big Data' Be Used to Prevent Disease Outbreaks?

Big data has been a hot topic of conversation ever since the emergence of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Researchers at UCLA believe they can use big data from social media sites to prevent disease outbreaks.

Surprisingly enough, previous studies have shown that Twitter can be used to prevent flu outbreaks. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University discovered that using social media tools is effective because with Twitter's average of 340 million tweets a day, health-related tweets would be released faster than information provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This research, which can be found in this CNN News article, has found that real-time information (tweets) can provide public health departments, doctors, hospitals, and schools with valuable public health information. This is possible by simply tracking the words "flu" or "sick" every day, and then pinpointing the areas and locations in which the tweets were sent.

UCLA believes that they can one-up this research and possibly track cases of HIV and monitor where outbreaks could potentially occur. Since 2012, the researchers have collected over 550 million tweets and used an algorithm that looked for words and phrases that pointed toward drug use and sex. The algorithm came away with nearly 10,000 tweets that mentioned one or the other.

Tweets from twelve different states revealed some relationship between HIV and the big data. The researchers concluded that there was a significant relationship between the "risky behavior" (drug use and sex) found in the tweets and the counties where the highest numbers of HIV cases were reported.

Although this study shows a causal relationship, the HIV data was taken from 2009 (provided by AIDSVu.org), so the researchers hope to conduct another study with more up-to-date statistics. To read more about the UCLA study that was funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health, visit this UCLA Newsroom article.