We know who's been sick: Facebook, Twitter map out influenza outbreak

By Catholic Online (NEWS CONSORTIUM)
12/28/2012
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

Social networking sites could provide bio-surveillance to map out epidemics

If you're one of the types of people who report their every single movement on social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter, you may have recently posted a health update such as this: "I finally got the flu." "I'm out sick." "Darn this head cold!" In doing so, you may have played a part in a new trend, "bio-surveillance," which may prove helpful in mapping flu epidemics.

As this map of flu cases in the U.S. demonstrates, the influenza epidemic hit the eastern seaboard of the United States particularly hard.

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LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The future of predicting flu outbreaks as well as managing the treatment of epidemics may soon be through social media such as Twitter. A small start up, called Sickweather declared the beginning of flu season before the Centers for Disease Control.

The Baltimore-based firm claims that members of the public that tweet and post to Facebook about their illness allowed them to declare the new influenza outbreak had hit the U.S. on October 18th.

The Centers for Disease Control somewhat belatedly warned that the outbreak was getting off to its earliest start on December 3rd. This prediction was still six weeks after Sickweather.

Founder Graham Dodge found that social media reports of the flue spiked 77 percent between August and October.

And while an increase in the number of those out sick is normal during that time period, the numbers found by Sickweather were 30 percent up from the previous year.

An independent technology firm declares the beginning of the dreaded flu season is still probably years away. Sickweather itself almost jokingly mentioned their discovery with the tweet, "Oh, hello #flu, you're a little early this year: sick.io/ksxfm."

Technology watchers though, have called the development interesting as social media sickness mentions are one of the few signals that can be tracked in real time as doctors attempt to understand how a sickness moves.

Search engine giant Google uses its Google Flu Trends app -- but does not make specific announcements about the flu season.

Sickweather has joined the growing trend in using social media to track public health trends.

Accenture Federal Services announced in November it had received a $3 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security to create a so-called "bio-surveillance" system.

The system will allow the Office of Health Affairs to monitor and respond to national health emergencies through Internet social media, enabling the OHA to collect and analyze social media platforms for information to "detect and respond to potential threats to national health security."

� 2012, Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.

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Pope Benedict XVI's Prayer Intentions for January 2013
General Intention: The Faith of Christians. That in this Year of Faith Christians may deepen their knowledge of the mystery of Christ and witness joyfully to the gift of faith in him.
Missionary Intention: Middle Eastern Christians. That the Christian communities of the Middle East, often discriminated against, may receive from the Holy Spirit the strength of fidelity and perseverance.

Keywords: Facebook, Twitter, influenza epidemic, bio-surveillance, tweets, colds. Sickweather

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1 - 1 of 1 Comments

Martin
4 months ago
Does it not ever occur to anyone that spreading news/suggestion of illness can be spreading the illness itself. Why all the continual suggestion that illness is a power and solid fact of being? Does none of the mind-body connection research really register on anyone? The facts are in. We can be well. We don't have to talk one another into beliefs and thus manifestation of illness. We can stop, even one small step at a time. We can return to truly having one All powerful God that created and creates only good. We don't have to bear false witness against one another by seeing ourselves as made outside the image and likeness of God and prone to something He never created.

Think about it. People that think more about God than about fads of illness are in fact healthier. We should stop all this illness-mongering. We just should. It's wrong. It too is sin. Do you ever wonder if the drug-industry is what's really behind it all anyway? First they sell the disease, then they sell the drug..... hmmmm....... where is free thinking America?

What if everyone tweeted a truth of God instead of some illness report? Report the good and true going on all around you. Learn to see it, magnify it, believe it more than the opposite illness. How about - I am healthy today and I was healthy all month and I expect to stay healthy in the days to come and I thank God that that is a permanent fact of being that I don't have to compromise with human suggestion of a supposed opposite. Even if illness seems to be very real, challenge that assumption!

Yesterday I felt like an illness was coming on, but as I learned from God to do as a child, I challenged it, and focused hard instead on an act of love and appreciation that I had recently experienced, fanned the flames of that feeling and poof, the apparent illness vanished. Try it with conviction. Anyone can do this. Spread the word. Spread the word. God's good is here and NOW!! We are not helpless victims of the latest human fads of thinking or propaganda... not even illness propaganda. You are God's children, not the world's. Take hold of your dominion! Be holy, whole, healed, even as He is holy, whole, healed. You reflect HIM! Do it! Even one crumb more than yesterday! Your confidence will increase as you succeed even a little, because God gives you this gift to challenge the world's thinking.... even about illness! But you must try it with conviction! Real conviction! You'll see that you can by doing it. Lift up your hearts. Lift them truly up to the Lord, to a higher way of being.... don't just wallow in false definitions of mortal being. Pick up your cross and, with God beside you, triumph! And don't trash it until you try it!

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