Mandeville Kate L, Harris Matthew, Thomas H Lucy, Chow Yimmy, Seng Claude
Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Academic Clinical Lecturer in Public Health, Imperial College London.
Public Health Ethics. 2014 Apr;7(1):47-50. doi: 10.1093/phe/pht023.
Social media applications such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have attained huge popularity, with more than three billion people and organizations predicted to have a social networking account by 2015. Social media offers a rapid avenue of communication with the public and has potential benefits for communicable disease control and surveillance. However, its application in everyday public health practice raises a number of important issues around confidentiality and autonomy. We report here a case from local level health protection where the friend of an individual with meningococcal septicaemia used a social networking site to notify potential contacts.
诸如推特、优兔和脸书等社交媒体应用已大受欢迎，预计到2015年将有超过30亿人和组织拥有社交网络账户。社交媒体为与公众进行沟通提供了一条快速途径，对传染病控制和监测具有潜在益处。然而，其在日常公共卫生实践中的应用引发了一系列围绕保密性和自主性的重要问题。我们在此报告一个来自地方层面卫生防护的案例，一名患有脑膜炎球菌血症患者的朋友利用社交网站通知潜在接触者。
