This Week on MappyHealth (Posted 09/30/2012)

Another week has gone by and we have lots of activity to share on MappyHealth.com. You may have noticed a few modifications to statistics on the site. We have been implementing a series of modifications to the terms tracked to reduce the amount of noise certain terms create. We have made three main changes.

First, we have removed cold, wee, eee, hib, and TB from our Twitter monitoring code. We found these terms to create a significant amount of noise with little value. We will be monitoring the impact of this change. Second, we added additional qualifiers focused on identifying tweets associated with younger demographics. The additional qualifiers include: child, infant, toddler, son, daughter, teen, daycare, school and work. Finally, we will begin to archive past tweets that do not have analytics on our page on a regular basis. This change will cause our total number of tweets tracked to fluctuate. As we progress forward we will be looking for new innovative ways to view trends of current and historic public health data on Twitter.

It’s been yet another active week! Don’t forget to tweet your findings or email us so we can include them in this weekly blog post!

Coronavirus

On 9/22/2012 slight chatter began about Coronavirus cases in Saudi Arabia and the UK. Several public and global health announcements started significant tweet activity spikes globally on 9/23/2012. Additionally a spike in activity was observed attributed to articles about Indonesia preparing quantities of antibiotics for possible increases in Coronavirus activity. On 9/29/2012 tweet activity increased related to articles reporting now new cases of the strain of Coronavirus observed prior, while the activity has started to calm down a bit, the chatter does continue well over the previous weeks baseline of basically zero tweets a day.

http://mappyhealth.com/by_taxonomy/Common%20Cold?graph_term=coronavirus

Dengue

On 09/22/2012 tweets with correlation to “hospital” qualifier increased. On 9/24/2012 tweets with correlation to “death” qualifier increased related to reports of increased deaths in Odisha. Again on 9/29/2012 the same spike was observed this time related to a report of a death in Delhi.

http://mappyhealth.com/by_taxonomy/Dengue?graph_qualifier=hospital http://mappyhealth.com/by_taxonomy/Dengue?graph_qualifier=death

Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease (HFMD)

On 09/27/2012 tweet activity increased. While the content was various it appears several tweets were from Singapore reporting affects on school and needs to wear masks.

http://mappyhealth.com/by_taxonomy/Enterovirus?graph_term=hfmd

Norovirus

On 9/25/2012 tweet activity increased slightly related to reports of Norovirus outbreak at a hotel in Newport, South Wales.

 

http://mappyhealth.com/by_taxonomy/gastroenteritis?graph_term=norovirus

H1N1

On 09/25/2012 tweet activity increased from 12 tweets per hour to 303 on reports of a variant case in Ontario Canada after contact with pigs.

http://mappyhealth.com/by_taxonomy/influenza?graph_term=h1n1

Malaria

We always like to see positive spikes and this one is interesting. A certain wrestling organization was frequently tweeted about on 09/22/2012 in the organizations efforts to “take down” Malaria.

http://mappyhealth.com/by_taxonomy/Malaria

Encephalitis

On 09/22/2012 tweet activity spiked, on reports of numerous cases in north India.

http://mappyhealth.com/by_taxonomy/Meningitis?graph_term=encephalitis

West Nile Virus

Numerous spikes were observed on reports of new cases of West Nile Virus on both our “West Nile” and “West Nile Virus” term graphs. On 09/26/2012 a spike in activity from 35 tweets per hour to 385 tweets the following hour was observed related to reports from the CDC.

http://mappyhealth.com/by_taxonomy/mosquito%20borne%20disease?graph_term=west%20nile%20virus

Whooping Cough

On 09/28/2012 a large and lengthy spike in tweet activity was observed related to reports of vaccination utilization in pregnant women.

http://mappyhealth.com/by_taxonomy/Pertussis?graph_term=whooping%20cough

Lung Infection

Every once in a while we will share some of the spikes related to famous individuals. This week we observed a spike in tweets about “lung infection” rising from a baseline of basically 0 per hour to over 300 per hour on 09/24/2012.

http://mappyhealth.com/by_taxonomy/Pneumonia?graph_term=lung%20infection

Polio

This one is positive. We observed activity in tweet activity beginning on 09/26/2012 and continuing through 09/28/2012 related to a call to end Polio by Bill Gates. He tweeted about this and the activity was primarily due to re-tweets gaining awareness worldwide of this cause.

http://mappyhealth.com/by_taxonomy/Polio

Rabies

09/28/2012 was apparently “world rabies day”. We saw a spike in tweet activity on tweets from various public and global health organizations looking to foster awareness about rabies.

http://mappyhealth.com/by_taxonomy/Rabies

Lyme Disease

On 09/28/2012 tweet activity related to Lyme disease increased and really has continued to trend upward. All this chatter is related to a certain presidential candidate and his PR campaign to address the disease in Virginia.

http://mappyhealth.com/by_taxonomy/tick%20borne%20disease?graph_term=lyme%20disease