Abstract
BackgroundMass gatherings, such as music festivals and religious events, pose a health care challenge because of the risk of transmission of communicable diseases. This is exacerbated by the fact that participants disperse soon after the gathering, potentially spreading disease within their communities. The dispersion of participants also poses a challenge for traditional surveillance methods. The ubiquitous use of the Internet may enable the detection of disease outbreaks through analysis of data generated by users during events and shortly thereafter.ObjectiveThe intent of the study was to develop algorithms that can alert to possible outbreaks of communicable diseases from Internet data, specifically Twitter and search engine queries.MethodsWe extracted all Twitter postings and queries made to the Bing search engine by users who repeatedly mentioned one of nine major music festivals held in the United Kingdom and one religious event (the Hajj in Mecca) during 2012, for a period of 30 days and after each festival. We analyzed these data using three methods, two of which compared words associated with disease symptoms before and after the time of the festival, and one that compared the frequency of these words with those of other users in the United Kingdom in the days following the festivals.ResultsThe data comprised, on average, 7.5 million tweets made by 12,163 users, and 32,143 queries made by 1756 users from each festival. Our methods indicated the statistically significant appearance of a disease symptom in two of the nine festivals. For example, cough was detected at higher than expected levels following the Wakestock festival. Statistically significant agreement (chi-square test, P<.01) between methods and across data sources was found where a statistically significant symptom was detected. Anecdotal evidence suggests that symptoms detected are indeed indicative of a disease that some users attributed to being at the festival.ConclusionsOur work shows the feasibility of creating a public health surveillance system for mass gatherings based on Internet data. The use of multiple data sources and analysis methods was found to be advantageous for rejecting false positives. Further studies are required in order to validate our findings with data from public health authorities.
Highlights
We extracted all Twitter postings and queries made to the Bing search engine by users who repeatedly mentioned one of nine major music festivals held in the United Kingdom and one religious event during 2012, for a period of 30 days and after each festival
Our work shows the feasibility of creating a public health surveillance system for mass gatherings based on Internet data
An estimated 35.3 million people are HIV-infected [4], drug-resistant Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a major public health concern [5], about 2 million cases of cancer are caused by infections each year [6], and infection is a major source of morbidity in primary care [7]
Summary
There are increasing national and international drivers to dramatically improve our capacity to rapidly respond to infectious diseases by widening access to tests in community settings and drive innovative real-time surveillance. Mass gatherings, such as music festivals and religious events, pose a health care challenge because of the risk of transmission of communicable diseases. This is exacerbated by the fact that participants disperse soon after the gathering, potentially spreading disease within their communities. The ubiquitous use of the Internet may enable the detection of disease outbreaks through analysis of data generated by users during events and shortly thereafter
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
