Global reaction to the recent outbreaks of Zika virus: Insights from a Big Data analysis

Abstract

ObjectiveThe recent spreading of Zika virus represents an emerging global health threat. As such, it is attracting public interest worldwide, generating a great amount of related Internet searches and social media interactions. The aim of this research was to understand Zika-related digital behavior throughout the epidemic spreading and to assess its consistence with real-world epidemiological data, using a behavioral informatics and analytics approach.MethodsIn this study, the global web-interest and reaction to the recently occurred outbreaks of the Zika Virus were analyzed in terms of tweets and Google Trends (GT), Google News, YouTube, and Wikipedia search queries. These data streams were mined from 1st January 2004 to 31st October 2016, with a focus on the period November 2015—October 2016. This analysis was complemented with the use of epidemiological data. Spearman’s correlation was performed to correlate all Zika-related data. Moreover, a multivariate regression was performed using Zika-related search queries as a dependent variable, and epidemiological data, number of inhabitants in 2015 and Human Development Index as predictor variables.ResultsOverall 3,864,395 tweets, 284,903 accesses to Wikipedia pages dedicated to the Zika virus were analyzed during the study period. All web-data sources showed that the main spike of researches and interactions occurred in February 2016 with a second peak in August 2016. All novel data streams-related activities increased markedly during the epidemic period with respect to pre-epidemic period when no web activity was detected. Correlations between data from all these web platforms resulted very high and statistically significant. The countries in which web searches were particularly concentrated are mainly from Central and South Americas. The majority of queries concerned the symptoms of the Zika virus, its vector of transmission, and its possible effect to babies, including microcephaly. No statistically significant correlation was found between novel data streams and global real-world epidemiological data. At country level, a correlation between the digital interest towards the Zika virus and Zika incidence rate or microcephaly cases has been detected.ConclusionsAn increasing public interest and reaction to the current Zika virus outbreak was documented by all web-data sources and a similar pattern of web reactions has been detected. The public opinion seems to be particularly worried by the alert of teratogenicity of the Zika virus. Stakeholders and health authorities could usefully exploited these internet tools for collecting the concerns of public opinion and reply to them, disseminating key information.

The impact of news exposure on collective attention in the United States during the 2016 Zika epidemic

“…From an epidemiological standpoint, our results are consistent with the recent findings of Bragazzi et al 34 , who analyzed various data streams to measure the global reaction to the 2015-2016 ZIKV outbreaks in different countries. Similarly, we did not find any statistically significant correlation between the attention to Wikipedia pages and the ZIKV incidence data in the U.S.…”

Using Google Trends to assess the impact of global public health days on online health information seeking behaviour in Central and South America

“…However, the percentage of internet users was high in most of the studied countries, only in Nicaragua (25%) the internet penetration was substantially lower compared to that in the other countries and thus could have potentially influenced our results [16]. Despite this, a study on the worldwide Zika-related digital behaviour found that activity came mainly from the CSA region, even though the Zika outbreak breached beyond this region and received global news coverage [27]. Second, the observed interest level is limited to those who use google as a search engine.…”

Ebola and Localized Blame on Social Media: Analysis of Twitter and Facebook Conversations During the 2014–2015 Ebola Epidemic

“…To begin, social media is sometimes used as a tool for digital epidemiology: publicly available and crowdsourced is analyzed to better detect and monitor disease outbreaks (Chou et al 2013;Elkin, Topal and Gurkan 2017;Schomberg et al 2016;Sinnenberg et al 2017;Woo et al 2017). Secondly, social media has been analyzed to explore the online content visualized by users in order to better understand the information that they consume, but usually without consideration for the manner in which this is received and appreciated (Basch et al 2015;Bragazzi et al 2017). Thirdly, some researchers have explored rumors and misinformation circulating on social media, and highlighted the importance for public health authorities to analyze such conversations and counteract the spread of false information by acting as moderators (Yang, Horneffer, and DiLisio 2013;Nagpal et al 2015;Sharma et al 2017).…”