Twitter kept up with Haiti cholera outbreak

Social media can track disease spread even in poorest countries

Twitter, blogs and other social media can be powerful tools for tracking infectious diseases as they spread in poor countries with weak institutions and infrastructure conclude researchers who followed social media during Haiti’s post-earthquake cholera outbreak in 2010.

Twitter posts and news about cholera gathered from the Internet in the first 100 days of the outbreak tracked closely with official data reported from hospital and clinics.