Chapter 15 - Early warning for emerging infectious disease outbreaks: Digital disease surveillance for public health preparedness and response

Abstract

Emerging infectious diseases such as SARS, Ebola virus, and COVID-19 are a significant threat to health globally. These global epidemics result in increased media consumption by the public for information and expressing their thoughts and ideas through internet search engines and social media. Analyzing people's internet search behavior regarding health-related information and social media use can guide real-time surveillance and early warning systems for emerging diseases and help in health preparedness and response by public health authorities and hospitals. There have been studies using social media and other digital data for the detection of infectious disease outbreaks. However, there are several methodological challenges with digital disease surveillance, such as confounding, nonrepresentativeness, nonindependence of data, sampling bias, and changes in search algorithms. There is a need for robust research methods to address these challenges and design digital disease surveillance systems that could help in the early response and containment of emerging epidemics.