Health officials use restaurant reviews to track disease - Protection now - AXA - BBC
▻http://www.bbc.com/capital/specials/protection-now/spotted/health-officials-use-restaurant-reviews-to-track-disease_a-1-17.html
Health officials in the United States are turning to online restaurant reviews and social media for help to locate and track outbreaks of foodborne illnesses.
The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene teamed up with restaurant review site Yelp.com and the Columbia University to analyse the restaurant review site for signs of possible outbreaks of foodborne illnesses.
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study this week reported that the pilot project successfully identified three previously unreported outbreaks of foodborne illnesses and multiple food-handling violations.
Over a seven-month period starting in July 2012, the project team scanned Yelp.com reviews for words such as “sick”, “vomit”, “diarrhea” or “food poisoning”, or that mentioned two or more people sick, and an incubation period of less than 10 hours.
Out of nearly 900 suspicious reviews, 468 were shown to relate to foodborne illness, of which only 3 percent had been reported to the city’s 311 nonemergency telephone and online service.
Idem à Chicago avec Twitter
New York is not the only city using social media to track dodgy dining experiences. In Chicago, health officials debuted a system in March 2013 that searches Twitter for posts about possible foodborne illnesses, with 2,900 tweets so far identified as suspect.
