Epidemic Intelligence: For the Crowd, by the Crowd

Abstract

Event Based Epidemic Intelligence (e-EI) encompasses activities related to early warnings and their assessments as part of the outbreak investigation task. Recently, modern disease surveillance systems have started to also monitor social media streams, with the objective of improving their timeliness in detecting disease outbreaks, and producing warnings against potential public health threats. In this tutorial we show how social media analysis can be exploited for two important stages of e-EI, namely: (i) Early Outbreak Detection, and (ii) Outbreak Analysis and Control. We discuss techniques and methods for detecting health-related events from unstructured text and outline approaches, as well as the challenges faced in social media-based surveillance. In particular, we will show how using Twitter can help us to find early cases of an outbreak, as well as, understand the potential causes of contamination and spread from the perspective of the field practitioners.