Business review website Yelp has partnered with the New York Health Department to track food-borne illnesses.
The U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report detailing the result of a pilot project for the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene that used Yelp reviews to pinpoint unreported outbreaks of food-borne illnesses.
The project used a program developed by Columbia University, which helped researchers look through a total of 294,000 Yelp reviews. The team focused on a period of nine months in 2012 and 2013 and searched for reviews containing words such as "diarrhea," "vomit," and "sick," among others. The computer would immediately alert health officials as soon as at least two people wrote about feeling sick after eating from the same restaurant. They then contacted the users through email addresses linked to their Yelp account to ask for additional information.
At the end of the project, the researchers were able to verify food-borne illnesses experienced by 16 people after eating at three restaurants. The health officials refused to disclose the names of the businesses. During the investigation, they found violations such as improperly sanitized work surfaces, bare-hand contact with ready-to-eat food, as well as live roaches and signs of mice.
Dr. Sharon Balter, a medical epidemiologist with the New York health department, told the New York Times, "With food-borne illnesses, it's much better to reach people sooner. When investigating an outbreak, we want to know what people who got sick ate, who else was with them and what items they all ate together. If you wait, people forget."
Initially, health officials checked the Yelp reviews once a week but decided to make it daily, to reduce the time lapse for evidence. They also planned to use other social media services such as Twitter and Google Flu trends, as well as other review sites.
More details of the report can be read in the May 23 issue of CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).
