scholarly journals Twitter activity about treatments during the COVID-19 pandemic: case studies of remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, and convalescent plasma

Author(s):  
Tymor Hamamsy ◽  
Richard Bonneau

AbstractSince the COVID-19 pandemic started, the public has been eager for news about promising treatments, and social media has played a large role in information dissemination. In this paper, our objectives are to characterize the public discussion of treatments on Twitter, and demonstrate the utility of these discussions for public health surveillance. We pulled tweets related to three promising COVID-19 treatments (hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir and convalescent plasma), between the dates of February 28th and May 22nd using the Twitter public API. We characterize treatment tweet trends over this time period. Most major tweet/retweet/sentiment trends correlated to public announcement made by the white house and/or to new clinical trial evidence about treatments. Most of the websites people shared in treatment-related tweets were non-scientific, ideological media sources that leaned conservative. Hydroxychloroquine was the most discussed treatment on Twitter. There is a gap between the public attention/discussion around COVID-19 treatments and their evidence. Twitter data can and should be used for public health surveillance during this pandemic, as it is informative for monitoring adverse drug reactions, especially as many people avoid going to hospitals/doctors.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tymor Hamamsy ◽  
Richard Bonneau

BACKGROUND Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, the public has been eager for news about promising treatments, and social media has played a large role in information dissemination. OBJECTIVE In this paper, our objectives are to characterize the public discussion of treatments on Twitter, and demonstrate the utility of these discussions for public health surveillance. METHODS We pulled tweets related to three promising COVID-19 treatments (hydroxychloroquine, remdevisir and convalescent plasma), between the dates of February 28th and May 22nd using the Twitter public API. We characterize treatment tweet trends over this time period. RESULTS Most major tweet/retweet/sentiment trends correlated to public announcement made by the white house and/or to new clinical trial evidence about treatments. Most of the websites people shared in treatment-related tweets were non-scientific media sources that leaned conservative. Hydroxychloroquine was the most discussed treatment on Twitter, and over 10% of hydroxychloroquine tweets mentioned an adverse drug reaction. CONCLUSIONS There is a gap between the public’s attention/discussion around COVID-19 treatments and their evidence. Twitter data can and should be used public health surveillance during this pandemic, as it is informative for monitoring adverse drug reactions, especially as many people avoid going to hospitals/doctors.


2011 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 1031-1043 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. M. Bann ◽  
R. Kobau ◽  
M. A. Lewis ◽  
M. M. Zack ◽  
C. Luncheon ◽  
...  

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Hicks ◽  
Julie A. Pavlin ◽  
Atar Baer ◽  
David J. Swenson ◽  
Rebecca Lampkins ◽  
...  

The "Preliminary Look into the Icd9/10 Transition Impact on Public Health Surveillance" roundtable will provide a forum for the syndromic surveillance Community of Practice (CoP) to discuss the public health impacts from the ICD-10-CM conversion, and to support jurisdictional public health practices with this transition. The discussion will be aimed at identifying conversion challenges, solutions, and best practices.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Lee

For the first time, the revised Common Rule specifies that public health surveillance activities are not research. This article reviews the historical development of the public health surveillance exclusion and implications for other foundational public health practices.


2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (7) ◽  
pp. 646-652 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alice Wang ◽  
Royal Law ◽  
Rebecca Lyons ◽  
Ekta Choudhary ◽  
Amy Wolkin ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joana M Barros ◽  
Jim Duggan ◽  
Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann

BACKGROUND Public health surveillance is based on the continuous and systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of data. This informs the development of early warning systems to monitor epidemics and documents the impact of intervention measures. The introduction of digital data sources, and specifically sources available on the internet, has impacted the field of public health surveillance. New opportunities enabled by the underlying availability and scale of internet-based sources (IBSs) have paved the way for novel approaches for disease surveillance, exploration of health communities, and the study of epidemic dynamics. This field and approach is also known as infodemiology or infoveillance. OBJECTIVE This review aimed to assess research findings regarding the application of IBSs for public health surveillance (infodemiology or infoveillance). To achieve this, we have presented a comprehensive systematic literature review with a focus on these sources and their limitations, the diseases targeted, and commonly applied methods. METHODS A systematic literature review was conducted targeting publications between 2012 and 2018 that leveraged IBSs for public health surveillance, outbreak forecasting, disease characterization, diagnosis prediction, content analysis, and health-topic identification. The search results were filtered according to previously defined inclusion and exclusion criteria. RESULTS Spanning a total of 162 publications, we determined infectious diseases to be the preferred case study (108/162, 66.7%). Of the eight categories of IBSs (search queries, social media, news, discussion forums, websites, web encyclopedia, and online obituaries), search queries and social media were applied in 95.1% (154/162) of the reviewed publications. We also identified limitations in representativeness and biased user age groups, as well as high susceptibility to media events by search queries, social media, and web encyclopedias. CONCLUSIONS IBSs are a valuable proxy to study illnesses affecting the general population; however, it is important to characterize which diseases are best suited for the available sources; the literature shows that the level of engagement among online platforms can be a potential indicator. There is a necessity to understand the population’s online behavior; in addition, the exploration of health information dissemination and its content is significantly unexplored. With this information, we can understand how the population communicates about illnesses online and, in the process, benefit public health.


Author(s):  
Chesley Richards ◽  
Brian Lee

Public health surveillance guides efforts to detect and monitor disease and injuries, assess the impact of interventions and assist in the management of and recovery from large-scale public health incidents. Actions informed by surveillance information take many forms, such as policy changes, new program interventions, public communications and investments in research. Local, state and federal public health professionals, government leaders, public health partners and the public are dependent on high quality, timely and actionable public health surveillance data. This Surveillance Strategy aims to improve overall surveillance capabilities, and by extension those of the public health system at large.


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