2014.ISDS.Abstracts.Final.pdf


ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2014. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, 
and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

154

ISDS 2014 Conference Abstracts

Online Reports of Foodborne Illness Capture Foods 
Implicated in Official Foodborne Outbreak Reports
Elaine O. Nsoesie*1, 2, Sheryl A. Kluberg1 and John S. Brownstein1, 2

1Boston Children’s Hospital, Boston, MA, USA; 2Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

Objective
We assessed whether foodservice reviews on Yelp.com (a business 

review site) can be used to support foodborne illness surveillance 
efforts.

Introduction
Traditional surveillance systems only capture a fraction of the 

estimated 48 million yearly cases of foodborne illness in the United 
States due to few affected individuals seeking medical care and 
lack of reporting to appropriate authorities. Non-traditional disease 
surveillance approaches could be used to supplement foodborne 
illness surveillance systems.

Methods
We obtained reviews from 2005-2012 of 5824 foodservice 

businesses closest to 29 colleges. After extracting recent reviews 
describing episodes of foodborne illness, we compared implicated 
foods to foods in outbreak reports from the U.S. Centers for Disease 
Control and Prevention (CDC).

Results
Broadly, the distribution of implicated foods across five categories 

was as follows: aquatic (16% Yelp, 12% CDC), dairy-eggs (23% 
Yelp, 23% CDC), fruits-nuts (7% Yelp, 7% CDC), meat-poultry 
(32% Yelp, 33% CDC), and vegetables (22% Yelp, 25% CDC). The 
distribution of foods across 19 more specific food categories was also 
similar, with spearman correlations ranging from 0.60 to 0.85 for 
2006-2011. The most implicated food categories in both Yelp and 
CDC were beef, dairy, grains-beans, poultry and vine-stalk.

Conclusions
Based on observations in this study and the increased usage of 

social media, we posit that online illness reports could complement 
traditional surveillance systems by providing near real-time 
information on foodborne illnesses, implicated foods and locations.

Keywords
foodborne illness; foodborne diseases; disease surveillance; social 
media; gastroenteritis

*Elaine O. Nsoesie
E-mail: elaine.nsoesie@childrens.harvard.edu    

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * (1):e200, 201