Health providers have suspected for some time that social media might be an early indicator of an epidemic. Now they have proof.

In particular, a new report shows that Twitter provided an early account of the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti. According to the study published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Internet news and social media were faster transmitters of information in tracking the cholera epidemic in Haiti than health officials. The tweets provided information that health officials wouldn't report until two weeks later.

"We can definitely use these sources to get early information about how a disease is spreading, and consequently help inform control or response efforts sooner," says the report's lead author, Rumi Chunara, Ph.D.

Chunara and the other two authors of the study, Dr. Jason R. Andrews, MD, and John S. Brownstein, Ph.D., determined sites like Twitter can help doctors and epidemiologists pinpoint the speed at which epidemics grow.

"One of the great benefits of these novel data streams is that they are available in real time," Chunara says.

The next step, she said, would be determining how to utilize real-time data concurrently, or even prospectively, to control outbreaks.

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To conduct the study, the researchers created a timeline by searching for the term cholera and the #cholera hashtag on Twitter from Oct. 20 to Nov. 3, 2010. In the two weeks before health officials reported the outbreak, 65,728 tweets with the word "cholera" were posted on Twitter.

The authors also used free information from HealthMap, a website that monitors news of outbreaks around the world. From HealthMap, they compiled 188,819 tweets in the first 100 days after the initial upsurge.

"Of course any data type will have its own biases and noise, and that is one of the main challenges in working with social media," Chunara says.

Examining social media could also help health officials tackle up-to-the-moments needs of the infected public and keep disease from spreading. Since the epidemic, 520,000 Haitians have been infected with Cholera and nearly 7,000 have died from the infection. Cholera is an acute intestinal infection caused by tainted water and food supplies.

Of course, there's a downside to social media reporting of epidemics as well. Tweets about swine flu in 2009 created a panic on Twitter while actual cases were at the lowest number. As real-life outbreaks increased, talk about swine flu on Twitter decreased. Still, Twitter provided researchers additional real-time data to track the disease and the public's reaction.