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Social Media Helps ID Belch¹ Source

If you’ve ever checked out the restaurant reviews on Yelp², you know that these little missives can tell you whether a bistro is overpriced or understaffed or just nothing to write home about. But they may also be able to tell the local health department whether an establishment has been serving up Salmonella.

如果你曾经看过Yelp的餐厅评论，你知道这些小小的信件可以告诉你，一家小酒馆价格过高还是人手不足，或者什么都不写。但他们也可以告诉当地卫生部门，一家企业是否在服务中是否存在沙门氏菌。

Researchers at Columbia University in New York City were looking into an outbreak of food poisoning at a local restaurant a few years ago when they got the idea of using social media to track gastrointestinal disturbances³.

纽约哥伦比亚大学的研究人员，几年前正在研究当地一家餐馆，发生的食物中毒事件，他们想到，可以利用社交媒体追踪胃肠道紊乱症人群。

“During the investigation⁴, the Department of Health noted⁵ that patrons had reported their illnesses on yelp in the reviews but hadn’t reported them via 311, the city’s official reporting service.”Computer scientist Thomas Effland, who led the study.

“在调查过程中，卫生署注意到，顾客在评论中报告了他们的疾病，但没有通过该市官方报告服务机构311报告他们。”计算机科学家Thomas Effland领导了这项研究。

Previous investigations⁶ had shown that monitoring social media for keywords associated with illness was a good way of rapidly identifying outbreaks of infectious diseases…such as the flu. So Effland and his team built a similar system for stomach symptoms. The Department of Health started using it in 2012.

以前的调查显示，监测与疾病相关的关键词的社交媒体，是快速确定传染病爆发的好方法，如流感病。所以Effland和他的团队为胃病症状建立了一个类似的系统。卫生署在2012年开始使用它。

“The tool works by sifting⁷ through the recent Yelp reviews for New York City restaurants each day to identify potential reports of foodborne illness.”Yelp reviews get scanned for telltale terms such as “vomit,” “diarrhea,” “food poisoning,” and “sick.” Flagged entries then then get passed along to epidemiologists for a closer look.

“该工具的工作原理是筛选最近Yelp对纽约市餐馆的评论，每天查明潜在的食源性疾病报告。”Yelp的评论被扫描了诸如“呕吐”、 “腹泻”、“食物中毒”、“生病”等关键词。然后将标记的条目传递给流行病学家进行仔细研究。

The system has produced some false positives, for example, from reviews that stated things like, the food “had a weird⁸ chunky consistency…hopefully we won’t get sick tonight.” And it missed a few posts, like when the writer misspelled “diarrhea” (a challenging word to write down even when you don’t have it).

该系统产生了一些误报，例如，从评论中说，食物“有一个奇怪的厚实的一致性...希望我们今晚不会生病”。它错过了几个职位，如作家拼写错误“ 腹泻“(即使没有时，也要写下具有挑战性的词汇)。

But overall, the results are nothing to sneeze at. Or in this case, barf at.“We found that using Yelp data has helped the Health Department identify approximately 1,500 complaints of foodborne illness in New York City each year. In total the system has found 8,523 complaints since July 2012, resulting in the identification of 10 outbreaks.”

但总的来说，结果是没有什么可以指责的。 或在这种情况下，“我们发现使用Yelp数据帮助卫生部门，每年在纽约市发现大约1,500起食源性疾病的投诉。该系统自2012年7月以来，一共发起了8,523宗投诉，其中10宗病症爆发。

The study is in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. The researchers plan to extend their analysis to Twitter. After all, many people use Twitter to let everyone know that they’re not well.

这项研究结果发表在《美国医学信息学会》杂志上。毕竟，很多人使用Twitter来让大家知道他们不好受。