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Twitter can help beat dengue fever in Brazil
Last reviewed: 30.06.2025
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Brazilian researchers have developed software to track dengue fever epidemics using Twitter posts.
A similar service has already been used to monitor the epidemic process during the swine flu pandemic A/H1N1. However, this is the first time it will be used to track dengue fever, as well as the spread of the infection on a city-by-city scale.
A team of scientists from two National Institutes of Science and the Federal University of Minas Gerais developed a computer program that searches Twitter for messages containing the word "dengue" and sorts such tweets by the author's location. Then, messages with jokes and information about public campaigns are filtered out, leaving for analysis only those that describe the author's personal experience.
During a test run of the program from January to May 2009, 2,447 tweets with the word "dengue" were analyzed. It turned out that the geography of the messages filtered by the program clearly correlated with official statistics on the spread of the epidemic. For the period from December 2010 to April 2011, the program processed 181,845 tweets, but the analysis of the correlation was postponed until official data was received.
If the program proves effective, it will be put into practice in November 2011, when Brazil's next annual dengue epidemic is expected to begin.