According to a recent newspaper study, computer scientists at John Hopkins University said that Twitter posts could function as an important public health information source.
The current scenario related to health issues can be realised by twitter posts. It can also be used to infer the ailment rise in certain areas of country and working of medicines for the ailments. The above result was derived from survey of 2 billion public tweets dated from May 2009 to October 2010. The main aim of study was to find that are twitter posts a useful source of public health information ? And it was concluded that it is indeed as said by computer scientists Mark Drezd. Scientists also said that they have learned many things from tweeters doctors like which over the counter medicines are being used by people to get their treatment at home only.
Health related tweets helped in uncovering the patterns related to depression, obesity, pain, cancer, insomnia, flu cases and few other ailments. The researchers at twitter also discovered about the misuse of medicine through various tweets. Computer scientist Michael J. Paul said that they found many people were taking anti biotic for curing flu. But they do not know that in reality antibiotics do not work on virus responsible for the flu and by taking antibiotics for it can lead to growth in the antibiotic resistance problem in public. So it is concluded that tweets have proven to be a helping hand in providing information about some serious medical misperceptions among people.
It is a complete misconception that twitter provides an insight about what other people are having in breakfast. Rather comments about hangovers and headaches can reveal a lot about nationwide health misconception and trends going on.
In US, researchers have come up with this new idea of using 140 character message in order to monitor the illness people are commonly suffering from and also to gain some knowledge about the medicines they are using for it and is it correct for the ailment or not. When this experiment was started scientists do not knew whether people tweet about their allergies or diseases on twitter but as they explored they found out that they do.
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