According to World Health Organization, more than 8,000 people have already died from Ebola virus, around 500 of whom are health workers. The number of cases is more than 15,000, and although it is showing a slowdown in some areas in West Africa, there's no way of knowing when it's going to stop.
Ebola doesn't have any cure yet, but the sooner it is diagnosed and treated, the higher chance the patient survives. Thus, the discovery that it may be possible to map potential diseases using common tools such as social media is promising news for many.
A San Diego State University professor Ming-Hsiang Tsou has recently authored a study that shows the connection between predicting potential outbreaks-specifically pertussis and influenza, based on his research-and social media and data from mobile phones. He believes that algorithms that may be applied to tweets and information stored in mobile phones can be used to predict and track outbreaks.
An example is the Ebola outbreak. It was declared an epidemic sometime in the early 2014. However, an application known as HealthMap has able to identify a mysterious hemorraghic fever about 9 nine days before the official confirmation by the WHO. The software gathers data from different sources including social media and news websites.
This method is considered more efficient and beneficial. First, the old way of collecting data from patients takes a lot of time and is very expensive. Moreover, they are a poor indicator of any potential outbreak or epidemic. Social media, on the other hand, can provide data in real time.
As more diseases become more widespread, there is therefore a need to perform surveillance, and that includes tapping social media.
Although there's no national program that uses social media for disease tracking and surveillance, there are many apps that can already help such as Flu Near to monitor flu outbreaks.