Are web searches indicators of disease outbreaks? Is Twitter useful?
I’ve tried playing on Twitter, the social networking tool that keeps things self-obsessed and brief, and now that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have weighed in and told me what to think, I agree:
Twitter sucks.
In a related item, researchers from Ottawa and Harvard reported in the Canadian Medical Association Journal today that search engine queries of the term "listeriosis" demonstrated a possible signal of the deadly outbreak that killed 20 Canadians a month before the official announcement was made.
Or not.
One of the researchers, John Brownstein of Children's Hospital Boston, said,
"In the case of listeriosis, as soon as the outbreak was announced we saw people in Canada searching for the word "listeria.' That's not surprising. The media drives a lot of people's search habits on the web."
But searching for the more technical term "listeriosis" began about a month before the public announcement, "and peaked a couple of weeks before."
The researchers don't know who was doing the early searchers. It could have been food inspection or industry officials investigating the possibility of the outbreak, they say, or queries by family and friends of people diagnosed early.
People were not diagnosed that early, except a couple. Much of the diagnoses came after initial media coverage.
And in another related item, newspapers are dying. But more targeted forms of information are doing okay. People, individuals, are still required to investigate, to probe and to weave disparate data into compelling stories, whether it’s journalism, public health or science.
People writing on Twitter, “I farted,” does not mean there is an increase in gastrointestinal upsets. People searching the Internet for listeriosis would not have prevented listeria bacteria from accumulating in Maple Leaf slicers and killing people.
Want effective food safety communication? Put a name and a face on victims
Acording to the Western Mail, in a speech tomorrow, Professor Hugh Pennington will tell world food safety experts at FoodMicro in Aberdeen that “we owe it to people like Mason Jones” to ensure “top-rate” safety systems are put in place. Mason Jones was a five-year-old boy who died after eating a school lunch in October 2005. Some 150 schoolchildren were sickened in the outbreak traced to the John Tudor & Son meat plant in Bridgend, which supplied hundreds of schools in the Valleys with cooked meats. Owner William Tudor was sentenced to 12 months in jail in 2007 after admitting breaching food hygiene rules and supplying contaminated meats to schools. A public inquiry into the outbreak, which Pennington led, was chronicled on barfblog.
What struck me about Pennington's comments was how he, like Doug and I have been doing through barfblog and food safety infosheets, was putting names and faces on the victims. Pennington is calling out the food safety professionals to make food safety personal. Food safety communication isn't just about the statistics, it's about the stories..jpg)
We're not just making this stuff up.
Morgan and colleagues (2002) evaluated various safety messages targeted at farmers regarding the use of personal protective structures for vehicles, by presenting message combinations and surveying 433 members of the target audience. Although the researchers did not look at practices (self-reported or otherwise) of the target audience, and only measured what the respondents felt would have the highest impact with them, they found, that messages based on stories, and those that were meant to elicit fear about individual practices had more impact with than presenting consequence-based statistics alone. Slater and Rouner (1996) investigated the effectiveness of a variety of messages containing a combination of narratives and statistics around the safety of alcohol consumption with a convenience sample of 218 undergraduate students. Slater and Rouner (1996) found that survey respondents who were non-believers prior to the presented information, rated messages with narratives as higher quality and perceived them as more effective. Slater and Rouner (1996) also found that statistics alone only reinforced respondents who identified themselves as already believing in the messages. Psychologist Howard (1991) argues that narratives and storytelling are effective methods in conveying information and suggests that there is a better understanding of one's place in a system when individual sees himself or herself as an actor within the context of a story.
Our research supports this concept of storytelling: the most impactful infosheets (from a food handlers' point of view) are the ones which put a name and a face on victims, the food safety offenders and their establishments. Food safety communications is about storytelling, and personalizing the outcomes for the front-line staff who are in control.
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Howard, G. S. 1991. Culture tales: A narrative approach to thinking, cross-cultural psychology, and psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 46: 187-197.
Morgan S.E., Cole H.P., Struttmann T. and Piercy L. 2002. Stories or statistics? Farmers' attitudes toward messages in an agricultural safety campaign. Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health. 8:225-39.
Slater, M. D., & Rouner, D. 1996. Value-affirmative and value-protective processing of alcohol education messages that include statistical evidence or anecdotes. Communication Research. 23: 210-235.
