I can say without a doubt I have had food poisoning from
eating at restaurants. Two of the most
severe episodes I can even state with a high level of probability that I know
what caused it. In Sydney, NS while on
my honey moon it was definitely the Digby Clams...the one that tasted slightly
off, but not so bad you spit it out. In
France, it was the warmed milk I put in my coffee at the lunch I had in a
quaint little Inn near the Millau Viaduct in Southern France.
Why you ask can I say with certainty that the Digby clams
or the warmed milk were the culprits? By
deduction my dear Watson. In both cases,
my husband and I had eaten the exact same things all day. With the clam I distinctly recall thinking,
hmmmm perhaps I should not have eaten that and with the milk...well my husband
takes his coffee black.
According to a report publishes last week in the MMWR
(Health Department Use of Social Media to Identify Foodborne Illness — Chicago,Illinois, 2013–2014) an estimated 55 million to 105 million people in the US
experience acute gastroenteritis caused by foodborne illness each year. In Canada, 1 in every 8 people get sick due
to foodborne illnesses. The unfortunate truth is that most people (me included)
do not seek treatment which results in underreporting so the statistics are
likely far higher. The Chicago
Department of Public Health (CDPH) and its civic partners launched FoodBorne Chicago and used Twitter Tweets to try to track potential foodborne illnesses.
Using a Twitterbot (an algorithm) plus a new online
complaint form. It searched for tweets
geo-located to Chicago and its surrounding suburbs that mentioned "food
poisoning." Human staff then read the tweets and marked them as relevant
or not relevant, to help improve upon the algorithm to learn what tweets to
pull in the future. Staff members then responded to the relevant tweets
themselves. For example, the Twitterbot
would locate a tweet such as "Guess who's got food poisoning? This
girl!" and the staff members would reply back with "That doesn't
sound good. Help us prevent this and report where you ate here (link to
Foodborne Chicago and a web form to report the illness)." Over 10 months, the Twitterbot helped the
department identify 133 restaurants for inspections and accounted for 6.9% of
the 1,941 health inspections of food establishments prompted by complaints
during the study period. For the 133 restaurants identified through the use of
the Twitterbot, 21 failed inspection and 33 passed with "critical or
serious" violations. Overall, Foodborne Chicago complaints contributed to
4% of the restaurants the city shut down for violations during the study
period. Most importantly, the city
likely would have never caught the majority of those complaints without the
Twitterbot.
The use of Twitter has been widely discussed for tracking
Pandemics and other outbreaks and certainly with this example shows that will a
little work in developing the Twitterbot can help to identify foodborne
illness. I wonder when we will see
Twitterbots start investigating topics such as Hand Hygiene and cleaning and
disinfection? Twitter just may be the tool to identify who is or who's not
washing their hands and where the dirtiest surfaces or unclean conditions
within hospitals and long-term care facilities are. Talk about peer pressure on steroids!
Bugging Off!
Nicole
