Department of Epidemiology, Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, Georgia, USA.
Infect Dis Poverty. 2013 Dec 20;2(1):31. doi: 10.1186/2049-9957-2-31.
As internet and social media use have skyrocketed, epidemiologists have begun to use online data such as Google query data and Twitter trends to track the activity levels of influenza and other infectious diseases. In China, Weibo is an extremely popular microblogging site that is equivalent to Twitter. Capitalizing on the wealth of public opinion data contained in posts on Weibo, this study used Weibo as a measure of the Chinese people's reactions to two different outbreaks: the 2012 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) outbreak, and the 2013 outbreak of human infection of avian influenza A(H7N9) in China.
Keyword searches were performed in Weibo data collected by The University of Hong Kong's Weiboscope project. Baseline values were determined for each keyword and reaction values per million posts in the days after outbreak information was released to the public.
The results show that the Chinese people reacted significantly to both outbreaks online, where their social media reaction was two orders of magnitude stronger to the H7N9 influenza outbreak that happened in China than the MERS-CoV outbreak that was far away from China.
These results demonstrate that social media could be a useful measure of public awareness and reaction to disease outbreak information released by health authorities.
随着互联网和社交媒体的飞速发展，流行病学家开始利用谷歌查询数据和推特趋势等在线数据来跟踪流感和其他传染病的活动水平。在中国，微博是一个极其流行的微博网站，相当于推特。本研究利用微博上发布的帖子中包含的丰富的舆论数据，将微博作为衡量中国人对两种不同疫情爆发的反应的一种手段：2012 年中东呼吸综合征冠状病毒（MERS-CoV）爆发，以及 2013 年中国发生的人感染禽流感 A（H7N9）疫情。
在香港大学 WeiboScope 项目收集的微博数据中进行关键词搜索。为每个关键词确定基线值，并在向公众发布疫情信息后的每一天，每百万条帖子中的反应值。
结果表明，中国人在这两种疫情爆发中都在网上做出了显著的反应，他们的社交媒体对在中国发生的 H7N9 流感疫情的反应要强烈两个数量级，而对远离中国的 MERS-CoV 疫情的反应则要弱得多。
这些结果表明，社交媒体可以作为衡量公众对卫生部门发布的疫情信息的意识和反应的有用指标。
