Yelp Identifies Food Poisonings at Restaurants in New York City

Yelp is an "online urban guide" and business review sites founded in 2004 and headquartered in San Francisco. Users/reviewers typically use it to comment about restaurants and bars, and it recently proved to help identify food poisonings.

And they weren't just any food poisonings. The online urban guide actually helped New York City health officials identify hundreds of food borne illness cases that went unreported, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It's estimated that 468 cases of food poisonings were not reported to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH).

As a result, the DOHMH joined forces with Columbia University and conducted a study that involved nearly 300,000 Yelp reviews for New York City restaurants between July 1, 2012 and March 31. 2013. Yelp agreed to provide the DOHMH with the compilation of reviews and the researchers used keywords to locate reviews that may have indicated an occurrence of food poisoning. They used "sick," "vomit," "diarrhea," or "food poisoning" to find the desired posts.

"As social media usage continues to grow among U.S. adults, health departments might consider additional surveillance methods to capture illness reports from those more likely to post a restaurant review online than contact a health department," the researchers wrote, via this Fox News article.

Only 15 of the 468 alleged food poisonings were reported. The DOHMH now plans to launch three investigations into restaurant-related food poisoning outbreaks based on the evidence they've compiled. And although some may think reviews aren't genuine due to competitors posting or people with general biases, each review contains the writer's contact information, so he DOHMH can do their due diligence in identifying the veracity of each relative review.

The CDC report, "Using Online Reviews by Restaurant Patrons to Identify Unreported Cases of Foodborne Illness - New York City, 2012-2013," was released on Thursday under the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report and provides a full overview of the DOHMH and Columbia University study.