Twitter Will Monitor Norovirus Outbreak In Britain; Tweet The Vomit Strategy Of FSA

Britain's Food Standards Agency (FSA) is using the data obtained from Twitter to track the spread of norovirus outbreak in Britain. The FSA has initiated a social media campaign that urges to post a tweet in case people are suffering with diarrhea and vomiting.

According to a BBC report, the FSA is trying to use posts made on social networking sites such as Twitter to chart the spread of the virus. According to experts, social media are better resources for collection of data than Google searches. "It's more about the immediacy... what's happening in their lives right now," said Dr. Sian Thomas.

James Baker, Social Media Manager, FSA, wrote his blog post that the agency hunts for spikes in key words such as symptoms and related terms and compare them with the number of lab-confirmed norovirus cases for the same periods. Baker informed that FSA uses the data to test Twitter's potential for early alerts to outbreaks, reported The Star Online.

Meanwhile, FSA made a statement that "There's a really good correlation between the number of mentions on Twitter of 'sick' and a range of search terms, with the incidents of illness as defined by laboratory reports" and disclosed that "Our current estimate is that between 70 to 80 per cent of the time, we are able to accurately predict an increase the next week."

The FSA searches for related tweets that contain words or phrases that indicate possible norovirus infection. Dr. Thomas said, "There's a whole range of things. It's mostly about the impact that being sick has on other things that are going on around them."

Dr. Thomas also said that the volume of norovirus symptom-related tweets can be used as the basis to predict a national outbreak of the virus. "In order to have the biggest impact, it's better to roll out that intervention when the numbers of cases of norovirus are going up... when we've got three consecutive weeks of a predicted increase," she added.