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Health Check: Can Tweets Trace Food Poisoning Outbreaks?

Can tweets trace food poisoning outbreaks?

12/08/2015

Can Tweets Trace Food Poisoning Outbreaks?

BBC World Service - Health Check, Can Tweets Trace Food Poisoning Outbreaks?

Social media may be a faster and better weapon against food poisoning.

Claudia Hammond on why tweeting about your night-long vomiting attack could be good for public health; beating bilharzia in Uganda; and the therapeutic power of music.

Claudia Hammond talks to Dr Elaine Nsoesie of the University of Washington, Seattle about her work on real time tracking and tracing of restaurant food poisoning outbreaks by using people’s tweets and web reviews after bouts of vomiting and worse.

Uganda is aiming to rid its people and waters of the parasitic disease, bilharzia or Schistosomiasis, by the year 2020.  Meera Senthilingam reports from Lake Victoria on the efforts to improve sanitation and deliver medical treatment in fishing communities.

BBC Health correspondent James Gallagher talks about research which suggests that your musical preferences reveal how empathic you are as a person.

Claudia also visits Raw Sounds – a community music project in South London aimed at exploiting the therapeutic power of making music for people with mental health problems.

(Photo credit: Getty Images)

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