Fentanyl panic goes viral: The spread of misinformation about overdose risk from casual contact with fentanyl in mainstream and social media.

Background: Fueled by misinformation, fentanyl panic has harmed public health through complicating overdose rescue while rationalizing hyper-punitive criminal laws, wasteful expenditures, and proposals to curtail vital access to pain pharmacotherapy. To assess misinformation about health risk from casual contact with fentanyl, we characterize its diffusion and excess visibility in mainstream and social media.

Methods: We used Media Cloud to compile and characterize mainstream and social media content published between January 2015 and September 2019 on overdose risk from casual fentanyl exposure.

Evaluation of Volume of News Reporting and Opioid-Related Deaths in the United States: Comparative Analysis Study of Geographic and Socioeconomic Differences.

Background: News media coverage is a powerful influence on public attitude and government action. The digitization of news media covering the current opioid epidemic has changed the landscape of coverage and may have implications for how to effectively respond to the opioid crisis.

Objective: This study aims to characterize the relationship between volume of online opioid news reporting and opioid-related deaths in the United States and how these measures differ across geographic and socioeconomic county-level factors.

Social Media Impact of the Food and Drug Administration's Drug Safety Communication Messaging About Zolpidem: Mixed-Methods Analysis.

Background: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issues drug safety communications (DSCs) to health care professionals, patients, and the public when safety issues emerge related to FDA-approved drug products. These safety messages are disseminated through social media to ensure broad uptake.

Objective: The objective of this study was to assess the social media dissemination of 2 DSCs released in 2013 for the sleep aid zolpidem.

Evaluation of Facebook and Twitter Monitoring to Detect Safety Signals for Medical Products: An Analysis of Recent FDA Safety Alerts.

Introduction: The rapid expansion of the Internet and computing power in recent years has opened up the possibility of using social media for pharmacovigilance. While this general concept has been proposed by many, central questions remain as to whether social media can provide earlier warnings for rare and serious events than traditional signal detection from spontaneous report data.

Objective: Our objective was to examine whether specific product-adverse event pairs were reported via social media before being reported to the US FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS).

Diversion and Illicit Sale of Extended Release Tapentadol in the United States.

Objective: Prescription opioid analgesics are commonly prescribed for moderate to severe pain. An unintended consequence of prescribing opioid analgesics is the abuse and diversion of these medications. Tapentadol ER is a recently approved centrally acting analgesic with synergistic mechanisms of action: μ-opioid receptor agonism and inhibition of norepinephrine reuptake.

Social Media Listening for Routine Post-Marketing Safety Surveillance.

Introduction: Post-marketing safety surveillance primarily relies on data from spontaneous adverse event reports, medical literature, and observational databases. Limitations of these data sources include potential under-reporting, lack of geographic diversity, and time lag between event occurrence and discovery. There is growing interest in exploring the use of social media ('social listening') to supplement established approaches for pharmacovigilance.

Increasing Patient Engagement in Pharmacovigilance Through Online Community Outreach and Mobile Reporting Applications: An Analysis of Adverse Event Reporting for the Essure Device in the US.

Background: Preparing and submitting a voluntary adverse event (AE) report to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a medical device typically takes 40 min. User-friendly Web and mobile reporting apps may increase efficiency. Further, coupled with strategies for direct patient involvement, patient engagement in AE reporting may be improved.

Surveillance for Neisseria meningitidis Disease Activity and Transmission Using Information Technology.

Background: While formal reporting, surveillance, and response structures remain essential to protecting public health, a new generation of freely accessible, online, and real-time informatics tools for disease tracking are expanding the ability to raise earlier public awareness of emerging disease threats. The rationale for this study is to test the hypothesis that the HealthMap informatics tools can complement epidemiological data captured by traditional surveillance monitoring systems for meningitis due to Neisseria meningitides (N. meningitides) by highlighting severe transmissible disease activity and outbreaks in the United States.

Comparing timeliness, content, and disease severity of formal and informal source outbreak reporting.

Background: Infectious disease surveillance has recently seen many changes including rapid growth of informal surveillance, acting both as competitor and a facilitator to traditional surveillance, as well as the implementation of the revised International Health Regulations. The present study aims to compare outbreak reporting by formal and informal sources given such changes in the field.

Methods: 111 outbreaks identified from June to December 2012 were studied using first formal source report and first informal source report collected by HealthMap, an automated and curated aggregator of data sources for infectious disease surveillance.

A case study of the New York City 2012-2013 influenza season with daily geocoded Twitter data from temporal and spatiotemporal perspectives.

Background: Twitter has shown some usefulness in predicting influenza cases on a weekly basis in multiple countries and on different geographic scales. Recently, Broniatowski and colleagues suggested Twitter's relevance at the city-level for New York City. Here, we look to dive deeper into the case of New York City by analyzing daily Twitter data from temporal and spatiotemporal perspectives.

Global distribution maps of the leishmaniases.

The leishmaniases are vector-borne diseases that have a broad global distribution throughout much of the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Despite representing a significant public health burden, our understanding of the global distribution of the leishmaniases remains vague, reliant upon expert opinion and limited to poor spatial resolution. A global assessment of the consensus of evidence for leishmaniasis was performed at a sub-national level by aggregating information from a variety of sources.

Digital drug safety surveillance: monitoring pharmaceutical products in twitter.

Background: Traditional adverse event (AE) reporting systems have been slow in adapting to online AE reporting from patients, relying instead on gatekeepers, such as clinicians and drug safety groups, to verify each potential event. In the meantime, increasing numbers of patients have turned to social media to share their experiences with drugs, medical devices, and vaccines.

Objective: The aim of the study was to evaluate the level of concordance between Twitter posts mentioning AE-like reactions and spontaneous reports received by a regulatory agency.

Global database of leishmaniasis occurrence locations, 1960-2012.

The leishmaniases are neglected tropical diseases of significant public health importance. However, information on their global occurrence is disparate and sparse. This database represents an attempt to collate reported leishmaniasis occurrences from 1960 to 2012.

Crowdsourcing black market prices for prescription opioids.

Background: Prescription opioid diversion and abuse are major public health issues in the United States and internationally. Street prices of diverted prescription opioids can provide an indicator of drug availability, demand, and abuse potential, but these data can be difficult to collect. Crowdsourcing is a rapid and cost-effective way to gather information about sales transactions.

Measuring vaccine confidence: analysis of data obtained by a media surveillance system used to analyse public concerns about vaccines.

Background: The intensity, spread, and effects of public opinion about vaccines are growing as new modes of communication speed up information sharing, contributing to vaccine hesitancy, refusals, and disease outbreaks. We aimed to develop a new application of existing surveillance systems to detect and characterise early signs of vaccine issues. We also aimed to develop a typology of concerns and a way to assess the priority of each concern.

New technologies for reporting real-time emergent infections.

Novel technologies have prompted a new paradigm in disease surveillance. Advances in computation, communications and materials enable new technologies such as mobile phones and microfluidic chips. In this paper we illustrate examples of new technologies that can augment disease detection.

Online reporting for malaria surveillance using micro-monetary incentives, in urban India 2010-2011.

Background: The objective of this study was to investigate the use of novel surveillance tools in a malaria endemic region where prevalence information is limited. Specifically, online reporting for participatory epidemiology was used to gather information about malaria spread directly from the public. Individuals in India were incentivized to self-report their recent experience with malaria by micro-monetary payments.

Integration and visualization of host-pathogen data related to infectious diseases.

Motivation: Infectious disease research is generating an increasing amount of disparate data on pathogenic systems. There is a growing need for resources that effectively integrate, analyze, deliver and visualize these data, both to improve our understanding of infectious diseases and to facilitate the development of strategies for disease control and prevention.

Results: We have developed Disease View, an online host-pathogen resource that enables infectious disease-centric access, analysis and visualization of host-pathogen interactions.

Participatory epidemiology: use of mobile phones for community-based health reporting.

Clark Freifeld and colleagues discuss mobile applications, including their own smartphone application, that show promise for health monitoring and information sharing.

Global capacity for emerging infectious disease detection.

The increasing number of emerging infectious disease events that have spread internationally, such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and the 2009 pandemic A/H1N1, highlight the need for improvements in global outbreak surveillance. It is expected that the proliferation of Internet-based reports has resulted in greater communication and improved surveillance and reporting frameworks, especially with the revision of the World Health Organization's (WHO) International Health Regulations (IHR 2005), which went into force in 2007. However, there has been no global quantitative assessment of whether and how outbreak detection and communication processes have actually changed over time.

Information technology and global surveillance of cases of 2009 H1N1 influenza.

The widespread adoption of increasingly sophisticated forms of information technology has paralleled the increase in rapid and far-reaching international travel. The emergence and global spread of the 2009 pandemic influenza A (H1N1) virus illustrated not only the hazards of an interconnected world, but also the powerful role of new methods for detecting, tracking, and responding to infectious diseases. Although formal reporting, surveillance, and response structures remain essential to protecting public health, a new generation of freely accessible, online, and real-time informatics tools for disease tracking are expanding the ability of public health professionals to detect weak signals across borders and to raise earlier warnings of emerging disease threats.

Characteristics of US public schools with reported cases of novel influenza A (H1N1).

Objective: The 2009 pandemic of influenza A (H1N1) has disproportionately affected children and young adults, resulting in attention by public health officials and the news media on schools as important settings for disease transmission and spread. We aimed to characterize US schools affected by novel influenza A (H1N1) relative to other schools in the same communities.

Methods: A database of US school-related cases was obtained by electronic news media monitoring for early reports of novel H1N1 influenza between April 23 and June 8, 2009.

Automated vocabulary discovery for geo-parsing online epidemic intelligence.

Background: Automated surveillance of the Internet provides a timely and sensitive method for alerting on global emerging infectious disease threats. HealthMap is part of a new generation of online systems designed to monitor and visualize, on a real-time basis, disease outbreak alerts as reported by online news media and public health sources. HealthMap is of specific interest for national and international public health organizations and international travelers.