P206 I Tweet, You Tweet, We All Tweet About Listeria in Ice Cream

Abstract

Background Forty-eight million Americans are affected by foodborne illnesses each year with over 3,000 deaths attributed to these illnesses indicating the need for accurate and timely communication of outbreaks and recalls. Objective To compare the frame of messages and source of tweets on Twitter from the Blue Bell Creameries listeria outbreak after the initial announcement of the foodborne illness outbreak in March 2015 and after the announcement of the recall of all Blue Bell products in April 2015. Study Design, Settings, Participants Tweets were gathered from ForSight and Crimson Hexagon using the key words “blue bell” and “listeria” or “recall.” Systematic random sampling was performed to analyze approximately 20% of tweets with the final sample size of 443 tweets from March 13-17, 2015 and 2,223 tweets from April 20-24, 2015. Measurable Outcome/Analysis A quantitative content analysis was performed to determine the source of the message, frame of the message, message sentiment, and use of web link in message. The Chi square statistical test was used to determine if there were any significant differences between the date ranges. A qualitative content analysis was performed in NVIVO to determine the most frequent words found in the tweets. Results A significant difference was found between the two date ranges between the frames of the tweets [x2 (6, N = 2,666) = 46.315, P Conclusion Social media could be a valuable communication avenue to communicate future foodborne illness outbreaks and food recalls. Funding None.