Da'ar Omar B, Yunus Faisel, Md Hossain Nassif, Househ Mowafa
College of Public Health and Health Informatics, King Saud Bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Institute of Public Health, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, UAE University, Al-Ain, United Arab Emirates.
J Infect Public Health. 2017 Jul-Aug;10(4):396-402. doi: 10.1016/j.jiph.2016.06.011. Epub 2016 Aug 8.
The recent outbreak of bubonic plague in Madagascar reminds us of the continuing public health challenges posed by such deadly diseases in various parts of the world years after their eradication. This study examines the role of Twitter in public health disease surveillance with special focus on how Twitter intensity, time, and location issues explain Twitter plague message delay.
We retrospectively analyzed the Twitter feeds of the 2014 bubonic plague outbreak in Madagascar. The analyses are based on the plague-related data available in the public domain between November 19th and 27th 2014. The data were compiled in March 2015. We calculated the time differential between the tweets and retweets, and analyzed various characteristics of the Tweets including Twitter intensity of the users.
A total of 6873 Twitter users were included in the study, of which 52% tweeted plague-related information during the morning hours (before mid-day), and 87% of the tweets came from the west of the epicenter of the plague. More importantly, while session of tweet lease and relative location had effect on message lapse, absolute location did not. Additionally, we found no evidence of differential effect of location on message lapse based on relative location i.e. tweets from west or east nor number of following. However, there is evidence that more intense Twitter use appears to have significant effect on message lapse such that as the number of tweets became more intense, time differential between the tweets and retweets increased while higher number of retweets diminished message lapse.
This study affirms that Twitter can play an important role in ongoing disease surveillance and the timely dissemination of information during public health emergencies independent of the time and space restrictions. Further ways should be explored to embed social media channels in routine public health practice.
近期马达加斯加爆发的腺鼠疫提醒我们，尽管这些致命疾病在全球多地已被根除多年，但它们依然给公共卫生带来持续挑战。本研究考察了推特在公共卫生疾病监测中的作用，特别关注推特热度、时间和地点因素如何解释推特上鼠疫相关信息的传播延迟。
我们回顾性分析了2014年马达加斯加腺鼠疫疫情期间的推特动态。分析基于2014年11月19日至27日公共领域中可获取的鼠疫相关数据。这些数据于2015年3月汇总。我们计算了推文与转发之间的时间差，并分析了推文的各种特征，包括用户的推特热度。
共有6873名推特用户纳入本研究，其中52%在上午（中午之前）发布了与鼠疫相关的信息，87%的推文来自鼠疫疫情中心以西地区。更重要的是，虽然推文发布时段和相对位置对信息传播延迟有影响，但绝对位置没有影响。此外，我们没有发现基于相对位置（即来自西部或东部的推文）或关注数量的位置差异对信息传播延迟有不同影响的证据。然而，有证据表明，更频繁使用推特似乎对信息传播延迟有显著影响，即随着推文数量增加，推文与转发之间的时间差增大，而更多的转发则减少了信息传播延迟。
本研究证实，推特在持续的疾病监测以及公共卫生紧急事件期间信息的及时传播中可发挥重要作用，不受时间和空间限制。应探索进一步将社交媒体渠道纳入常规公共卫生实践的方法。
