The cliche of social media is that it is full of people talking about their lunch. But this is one that the Food Standards Agency is now actively trying to encourage, at least if your lunch is heading the wrong way. Vomiting? Nauseated? Diarrhoea? Tweet it and you know at least one person will be reading – someone on the FSA’s norovirus monitoring team.
Since 2013, the agency has been developing an online epidemiology toolkit. It tried to work with Google initially, but found social media a far faster means of correlating lab results with geotagged incidences of people moaning about being “sick” (or a range of related search terms). To sharpen its results, the FSA excluded all simultaneous references to pregnancy, alcohol and anxiety, which have their own vomit-inducements.
This has greatly improved the lag time in its systems. Lab results take two days arrive, while tweets are instant. The FSA believes that the new system can predict an increase in norovirus in the following week between 70% and 80% of the time.
Three consecutive weeks of increases is the trigger point for what the FSA would define as an outbreak. That triggers a digital public awareness campaign advising people on how to look after themselves and avoid getting ill. A 10-mile run, seafood curry, 20 Rothmans and plenty of pinot grigio? Apparently not.
“The intervention is really quite basic,” says Dr Sian Thomas, head of information management at the FSA. “It’s about washing your hands, it’s about looking after yourself and not coming in to contact with other people while you’re sick.” The NHS advises people to stay home for two days after the initial gut-chunder symptoms disappear, because they remain infectious.
Online epidemiology is still in its infancy. In 2014, Google cancelled a global programme to track incidents of flu and dengue fever through its search bar. Of course, some social media are better suited to it than others. Rollout of norovirus monitoring to Instagram isn’t on anyone’s agenda.
How to stop a norovirus outbreak: tweet when you vomit
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