Twitter accurately tracked Haiti cholera epidemic

Twitter was found to yield data that would have been a quicker way of detecting and tracking the deadly cholera outbreak in Haiti than traditional methods. The study found that online social media and news feeds were faster than, and broadly as accurate as, the official records at detecting the start and early progress of the epidemic, which hit Haiti after the earthquake in January 2010 and has killed more than 6,500 people. The authors used HealthMap, an automated surveillance platform, to measure the volume of news media generated during the first 100 days of the outbreak, and they also looked at the number of ‘cholera’ posts on Twitter. They found that, as the official number of cases increased and decreased, so did the volume of informal media reports about cholera. Rumi Chunara, a research fellow at HealthMap and Harvard Medical School, and lead author of the study, emphasized that these informal reports...