Author: Allie Wilkinson / Source: Science News for Students
Reviews of restaurants on social media can be helpful. They may guide you to a popular eatery, or point you to what dishes are popular.
They might also tell you when and where the food left someone feeling ill. Now scientists are training computers to scout online reviews for such signs of sickening food.Tainted food and drink sicken some 48 million people in the United States each year. That’s according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly seven in every 10 of those incidents came after dining in restaurants.
Government agencies collect reports of these incidents. They typically learn of them when someone calls in a complaint to the local health department. Not everyone will do that. There is, however, a good chance someone posted about it online. Those posts can be helpful to epidemiologists (Ep-ih-dee-me-OLL-oh-gizts). These researchers study disease outbreaks and their spread.
Online sources “may give you an early signal of something happening,” says Mauricio Santillana. He works at Harvard University Medical School in Boston, Mass. He was not involved in the study. An expert in digital epidemiology, he uses the internet to track disease.
In 2012, scientists at Columbia University in New York City…
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