While I've been obsessing over cholera and politics in Haiti, others are minding the store. Among them is CIDRAP, which has published a new FLU NEWS SCAN: Avian flu in Japan, US flu activity, anti-vaccine ad, H1N1 in dogs, H1N1 Twitter traffic. Excerpt:
Toronto researchers who analyzed the volume and content of Twitter traffic during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic found that news and information were the most common tweet topics and that patterns varied over the course of the pandemic.
Their report appeared yesterday in Public Library of Science (PLoS) One. Using both automated and manual systems, they looked at a random sample of about 5,400 tweets from more than 2 million that appeared between May 1 and Dec 31, 2009.
They found that the posts' wording evolved from "swine flu" to the preferred "H1N1" terminology and that public health events such as the World Health Organization's pandemic declaration and major news stories prompted spikes in tweets.
Information on protective behaviors peaked as the outbreak threat increased, and reports of personal experiences with the flu rose during the two pandemic waves. News Web sites were the most popular sources cited (23.2%), and only 4.5% of tweets were identified as misinformation.
The investigators concluded that social media such as Twitter are useful for gauging knowledge during public health events.
Click through to find the link to the PLoS One report. Anecdotally, I can confirm that Twitter has become my preferred source for news posts from Haiti.
In addition to CIDRAP, you should be visiting Avian Flu Diary, Arkanoid Legent, and Chen Qi for the best surveys and analysis of what's going on in infectious diseases around the world.
For more specialized sites, see Superbug, Bird Flu Information Corner, and virology blog. And browse around in the Bloggers and Forums lists. Flublogia is a bigger country than it seems.
