Food safety officials are trawling millions of Twitter posts for early signs of food poisoning and norovirus outbreaks – by looking for hashtags such as #barf and #sick.
The Food Standards Agency says trials show how information from tweets lets it identify a norovirus outbreak two weeks earlier than the normal reporting process through GPs.
The scheme gives the location of Twitter users sending the messages, letting officials link a spike in certain hashtags to an area.
This will be used to give an early warning to GPs and hospitals to prepare for a rise in the number of cases of vomiting and diarrhoea. The FSA denied it was intrusive, saying: ‘Tweets are open information. By putting something like ‘#sick after eating in restaurant’ out there, you are telling the world.’
It also wants to use data from smart ovens and fridges linked to the internet to monitor how families eat and cook. This would let it see trends for people to burn food, which creates cancer-causing chemicals, or undercook chicken, which is a food-poisoning risk. – Daily Mail