Twitter may influence the spread of disease

The northern hemisphere's flu season will soon be here. If you are getting vaccinated and tweet it, will your followers follow you to the doctor's surgery ? or are they the sort of people who have an appointment booked already?

Researchers in the US have mined Twitter to map who tweets for and against flu vaccination, and found that the results parallel the prevalence of vaccination. Now they want to find out whether Twitter just reflects attitudes to vaccination or helps to spread them.

Marcel Salath? of Penn State University in University Park, Pennsylvania, collected 478,000 tweets referring to flu in late 2009, when vaccination for the swine flu pandemic became available in the US. A team of students categorised 10 per cent of the tweets as for, against or neutral about vaccination. Then these tweets were used to create a computerised screening test that classified the rest.

Each tweet carried data on the region it came from. The team found that vaccination rates were lower in areas where tweets tended to be more negative about vaccination, and vice versa.

Such mapping could help target health information campaigns, says Salath?. "If we know where people are particularly misinformed, then we know where we should do a better job at informing."

Echo chambers

Salath? is also using Twitter to track several other health problems, including obesity, for which social attitudes may influence their spread.

The flu tweets flowed in "echo chambers", mainly between people who agreed with each other. Salath? is now trying to work out whether that's because people talk to people who think like them, or think like people they talk to. He is developing new statistical tools to tease this out of Twitter data. "Preliminary analysis shows it is very likely that negative opinions of vaccination are contagious on online social networks," he says.

That could be bad news as the number of people who refuse to be vaccinated grows. Twitter is a rich source of data for mapping these attitudes, says Salath?. Efforts to change hearts and minds may or may not work, "but if you don't even know where your problem is, you're never going to solve it".

Journal reference: PLoS Computational Biology, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002199

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Have your say

Only subscribers may leave comments on this article. Please log in.

Only personal subscribers may leave comments on this article

Subscribe now to comment.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/19587add/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Carticle0Cdn210A550Etwitter0Emay0Einfluence0Ethe0Espread0Eof0Edisease0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

doppelganger labor day jane fonda interpol fist under armour pepsi