Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2018-2019)

Foodborne Disease has emerged as a serious and underreported public health problem with high health andx000D
financial costs. The World Health Organization (WHO) identifies foodborne illness outbreaks as a major globalx000D
public health threat in the twenty-first century. Traditional surveillance systems such as Canadian Notifiablex000D
Disease Surveillance System capture only a fraction of the estimated 4 million annual cases of foodbornex000D
illness in Canada. They rely on the collection of numerous indicators including clinical symptoms, virologyx000D
laboratory results, hospital admissions and mortality statistics resulting in a median delay of 6.5 days betweenx000D
case report from clinicians to the health departments. Public health decision-makers consider the delayedx000D
notification as a barrier to investigating foodborne disease, as it can potentially distribute geographically acrossx000D
great distances. Early detection of foodborne disease can reduce the number of exposed individuals byx000D
removing contaminated product from retail and foodservice outlets, increasing public awareness, and offering ax000D
more timely preventative and therapeutic measures to exposed individuals.x000D
We propose that social media data should be exploited as a complementary component of the traditionalx000D
surveillance systems. The enormity and high variance of the information that propagates through large userx000D
communities presents the opportunity to mine the data for signals of foodborne disease activity; analyze illnessx000D
patterns qualitatively and quantitatively; and to predict future outbreaks. We propose a host of socialx000D
media-based predictive models to characterize and detect upcoming foodborne illness outbreaks throughx000D
ambient tracking and monitoring over users' conversations in social media. The objective is to advance researchx000D
on foodborne disease detection from non-traditional sources to supply health decision makers with situationalx000D
awareness.