Abstract
BackgroundThe study demonstrates the potential in using newspaper information as a proxy for monitoring dengue fever outbreaks in India. Online newspapers are being considered as sources of information on disease surveillance, early outbreak detection, and epidemiology research. Our objective is to understand the complex dengue epidemiology and discover inter-relationships between dengue fever and local social-environmental factors by mining information from local Indian news articles.ResultsWe search and extract articles from the newspaper database, LexisNexis. News articles related to dengue fever in India are analyzed together with local environmental, climate, and population data in both temporally and spatially to study disease epidemiology. We also examine the influence of newsworthiness for constructing a disease surveillance system. In terms of temporal aspects, dengue outbreaks follow consistent patterns every year. However, for many areas, this application is frustrated by the relatively small numbers of news articles.ConclusionsThe study has advanced capabilities in producing approaches that provide for richer interpretations of textual information provided in newspaper articles. Such approaches appear particularly well suited for developing countries with relatively poor medical infrastructures and records.
Highlights
The study demonstrates the potential in using newspaper information as a proxy for monitoring dengue fever outbreaks in India
We described the strong correlation between numbers of dengue fever cases and number of associated news articles from local major newspapers (The Times of India (TOI) and Hindustan Times (HT))
The numbers of news articles concerned with dengue fever serve as a proxy to predict temporal variability in dengue case numbers for India [2]
Summary
We showed newspaper articles to be useful in providing proxy data capable of monitoring outbreaks of certain infectious diseases, including dengue fever in India and Zika in Brazil [2]. This information helps in understanding temporal transmission trends in diseases, as well as the seriousness of outbreaks. Beyond the fundamental information on occurrence derived from straightforward word searches, Dengue fever is used as an illustrative example of a disease for this study This mosquito-borne viral disease commonly occurs in tropical countries and produces a significant public health burden, especially during epidemics. According to Murray et al, dengue fever is known to be endemic in 125 countries with case
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