Yelp is the spot to whine about slow service or rude bartenders or mac & cheese that wasn’t quite cheesy enough. And according to a new CDC report, it may also be a way to track food poisoning outbreaks.

New York City public health authorities discovered three previously unreported outbreaks of food-borne illness by mining data from nearly 300,000 Yelp restaurant reviews over a nine-month period, according to a report released Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The researchers used software to search for terms like “sick,” “vomit,” “diarrhea” or “food poisoning” in reviews posted between July 1, 2012, and March 31, 2013. Yelp provided the investigators with the data in a searchable format.

They found 499 reviews that suggested someone had suffered food poisoning. Only 15 of those reviews matched cases of food poisoning outbreaks that already had been disclosed to the department, either through its online or telephone (311) reporting systems.

The investigators further narrowed the reviews to instances where multiple people had fallen ill, and followed up with online messages and phone calls to people who had posted those reviews. From those followups, they identified three outbreaks, involving a total of 16 people at three restaurants.

Public health authorities conducted investigations at the restaurants and found multiple food-handling violations at all of them.

The report notes that while the Yelp data mining was useful for revealing previously unreported outbreaks, it was also a pretty cumbersome process. Still, the researchers add: In these days of constant social media sharing (and over-sharing), people may be a lot more likely to talk about their illness on Yelp (or Facebook or Twitter) than report it to a public health department.