Keynote Message

The landmark publication in Nature of the Google Flu Trends project sparked global interest in the use of internet search engines as disease surveillance tools. New epidemiological methods have now been developed to harness the huge volume of data generated from search engines. The evolution of social media platforms has given researchers novel ways to explore disease outbreaks, and to understand the general public's response to them. Unfortunately, to date little research has been published using these approaches for the surveillance of companion animal diseases.

In this session, human health case examples will initially be explored to discuss the strengths and pitfalls of this type of research. Exploratory research around companion animal infectious diseases will be presented to highlight the ease of compiling such data. Potential new exciting avenues for quantitative and qualitative companion animal research will be presented.

Key References

1.  Ginsberg J, Mohebbi MH, Patel SR, et al. Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data. Nature. 2009;457:1012–1014. DOI: 10.1038/nature07634.

2.  Charles-Smith LE, Reynolds TL, Cameron MA, et al. Using social media for actionable disease surveillance and outbreak management: a systematic literature review. PLoS One. 2015;10(10):e0139701.

3.  Stevens KB, Pfeiffer DU. Sources of spatial animal and human health data: casting the net wide to deal more effectively with increasingly complex disease problems. Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology. 2015;13:15–29.