Marcel Salathé publishes paper on digital epidemiology
05.07.2013 12:31
In the article, Dr. Salathé and colleagues from the Harvard Medical School highlight the importance of digital epidemiology in the face of emerging public health threats such as avian influenza A (H7N9) and the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). They describe how novel digital datasources such as websites, blogs, and social media, can be used for infectious disease surveillance.
Dr. Salathé has recently published several papers in this rapidly growing field, including an article entitled “The Dynamics of Health Behavior Sentiments on a Large Online Social Network” in the journal EPJ Data Science. This paper was featured in the magazine Science, and is the first large-scale analysis of the spread of health sentiments on the social network site Twitter.
Dr. Salathé is an assistant professor and Society in Science – Branco Weiss fellow in the Department of Biology at Penn State. He advises both the US and the Swiss government on the use of digital epidemiology to mitigate the spread of infectious diseases in the population.