When it was discovered that an outbreak of Legionnaire s Disease at the Playboy Mansion was responsible for sickening at least 24 attendees of the DomainFest Global Conference in February, it was thanks to Facebook, not the Los Angeles County health authorities. Writing in The New York Times, Bronwyn Garrity describes this recent epidemiological phenomenon that uses social media outlets, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, to track the spread of diseases. The approach is simple: When Nico Zeifang came down with chest pains, chills, cough, and a soaring fever after participating in the DFG Conference, he resorted to Facebook to ask fellow attendees whether any of them were experiencing similar symptoms and in the blink of an eye, users shared personal anecdotes and came up with the diagnosis before LA public health officials could even swoop in on the scene.
According to Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, deputy director for information science at the CDC, it makes perfect sense to adapt the speed and flexibility of social networking to disease surveillance.
Although armed with the potential to aid in the investigation of infectious disease spread, social media is a double-edged sword, in that it may just as well contribute to the spread of disease misinformation about causes and cures. Thankfully, though, erroneous reports submitted by amateurs have been surprisingly few, says Dr. John Brownstein, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School who helped design HealthMap, a website that tracks global outbreaks in real time.
Ironically, people often feel more comfortable sharing personal information on Facebook, not to mention Twitter, than with governmental health officials, so perhaps certain networking sites will become the wave of the future for disease surveillance, adds ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross.
