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 “We know that the majority of cases of foodborne outbreaks really
never end up getting reported to the local health department
anywhere in the country,” Dr. Bechara Choucair told Reuters Health
in a phone call.
“We realize the people might not pick up the phone and call the
doctor, but they might go to Twitter and complain to the world that
they got food poisoning from eating out,” he said.
Choucair and his colleagues in the Chicago Department of Public
Health wondered if there was some innovative way for them to
identify new cases of foodborne outbreaks in Chicago that are
regularly missed.
So they enlisted a technological collaborative group called Smart
Chicago to help them.
“Smart Chicago collaborative helped us develop an app that literally
sifts through hundreds of thousands of tweets every day that are
coming from Chicago or linked to Chicago that might include a
reference to a food borne illness,” Choucair said.
The app, called Foodborne Chicago, uses an algorithm to identify
tweets that might be related to food poisoning symptoms in or near
Chicago.
The app then responds to the person who sent the original tweet,
saying, “That doesn’t sound good. Help us prevent this and report
where you ate here,” and includes a link to an online form for
reporting the details.
Foodborne Chicago tweets as @foodbornechi.
As Choucair and his coauthors noted in a paper in Morbidity and
Mortality Weekly Report, published by the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, the program was launched in March 2013.
During the first 10 months of the program, Foodborne Chicago
identified 270 tweets describing complaints of food poisoning.
A total of 193 complaints were then submitted through the website,
which lead to unannounced health inspections at 133 restaurants.
The health inspectors found at least one critical violation in 20
percent of those restaurants. The usual rate for one critical
violation during regular health inspections is about 16 percent, the
authors say.
About 16 percent of the restaurants reported through Foodborne
Chicago failed inspections and were closed.
“The overwhelming majority of people are really excited to know that
their local government is listening - but not only just listening -
is actually taking their complaint seriously and acting on it,”
Choucair said.
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Chicago isn’t the only city to use new technology to track food
poisoning. The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
examined restaurant reviews from an online review website to
identify foodborne illness complaints.
“I think it's really progressive of health departments to start
looking at signals online to figure out where to put their
resources,” Ben Chapman told Reuters Health in a phone call.
Chapman is a food safety specialist and researcher with North
Carolina State University in Raleigh. He wasn’t involved in the
study.
‘The focus is on trying to identify outbreaks that may not have been
seen from traditional public health signals through hospitals or
reportable disease databases, so yeah, it's really good stuff,”
Chapman said.
Chapman said there could be an issue with resources when people have
to follow up with extra inspections based on all those tweets and
online signals.
“But the good outweighs the bad,” he said.
Chapman said there is a movement for health departments to integrate
their inspection reports directly into websites like Yelp, so that
people can take that information into consideration when they’re
searching for restaurants.
Choucair said his team would like to see this app utilized by other
health departments across the country.
“The codes for the app are open to the public, we want people to use
it,” he said.
For developers, the open-source software is available on GitHub,
here: http://bit.ly/1zA0DPT.
SOURCE: http://1.usa.gov/1mrYzmR
CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, online August 15, 2104.
[© 2014 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2014 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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