Social media trends for health librarians: a primer on using social media for clinical disease surveillance

Abstract

This column introduces health librarians to the relatively new field of clinical disease surveillance. As such, it looks at how social media is currently being used around the world to track illnesses in real time by using key internationalwebsites such as Google Flu and HealthMaps. Clinical surveillance is a term that refers to an ongoing collection and analysis of health data about diseases that may pose a threat to public health [1]. Many international institutions, such as theWorld Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control [2], use databases and computer systems to track flu outbreaks, infection rates of the human immune deficiency virus (HIV), and bioterror- ism threats.