@LizziejackLiz @Mrs_Sarcasm_101 Had a serious bout of man flu, mixed with some green diarrhea and yellow vomiting. Too much info?; D — Traddski (@Traddski) November 5, 2012



In fact, @Traddski, there has never been a better time to broadcast your bowel movements on Twitter.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has embarked on a social media listening project that, it hopes, has the potential to predict outbreaks of the winter vomiting bug, norovirus, earlier than ever before.

FSA's social media team sifted through Twitter data from the last norovirus outbreak during the winter of 2012-13, hunting for spikes in certain related key words and phrases being used in tweets. They then compared the frequency of the key words to the number of lab reports of confirmed norovirus cases in the same period.

They found significant correlations between spikes in the number of lab reports and spikes in conversations on Twitter using words and hashtags such as #winterbug, #norovirus, sickness bug, winter virus and vomiting.

What's more, they discovered a set of symptom keywords, such as #barf, #flu, chuck up, puke, retch and upset stomach, which strongly correlated to future lab cases.

"We found that the changes in the number of tweets using symptom keywords predicted the increase in lab reports at the start of the annual peak in human cases," said James Baker, FSA social media manager.

In some cases, spikes in the key words were being shared up to four weeks earlier than Public Health England released confirmed lab reports.

There was a high correlation between tweets using specific keywords and confirmed lab reports. Photograph: Food Standards Agency

The FSA is currently testing how Twitter monitoring can provide early alerts to norovirus. The agency will also be looking into other areas where social media can help public bodies in similar ways.

"There's the potential for us to idenitfy outbreaks of norovirus much earlier than before, giving us the opportunity to proactively share our advice and guidance with those who might be affected, alert other government departments and industry, and perhaps even help to reduce its spread," said Baker.

Tweets describing the colour and consistency of your #barf may be gross, but they helped inform the FSA project which, once it has refined its monitoring model, could prevent tweets like this one:

Cases of winter vomiting bug #norovirus rise to over 1 million, from 880,000 last week - UK Health Protection Agency http://t.co/wxDrGOwe — BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) December 28, 2012

Of course, there are caveats on how trustworthy the data can be, said Baker. People self-diagnose. Symptom keywords and search terms are broad so "there's always going to be a bit of noise". And early warnings of an outbreak will increase chatter around the subject and might skew the data.

"But what we'd hope is that as this online chatter increases, the subsequent number of cases would plateau or decrease because of an earlier intervention," Baker said.

The FSA also found strong correlation between search terms on Google with lab reports – but during and after an increase in norovirus outbreaks had been reported rather than beforehand.

Google trends were not as good as Twitter as an early alert system, said Baker. Perhaps because people tweet out their feelings, but use search engines to find out more about something already being experienced by friends and family and reported by the media.

So, give thanks to the public-spirited souls who feel the need to spew out details about their spewing on social media – such sharing may serve the greater good.

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