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Updated: May 23, 2026

High-throughput Detection Method for Influenza Virus
Published on: February 4, 2012
Can social web help to detect influenza related illnesses in Turkey?
Ugur Bilge1, Selen Bozkurt, Basak Oguz Yolcular
1Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, Faculty of Medicine, Akdeniz University, Antalya, Turkey. ubilge@akdeniz.edu.tr
Abstract:
In this study, a content analysis of Twitter is carried out to determine the frequency of tweets mentioning influenza like illnesses (swine flu, cold etc.) and results have been compared with news articles, Google search trends and national health statistics in Turkey. Between 1st January 2009 and 31st December 2010, over 4,165 influenza-related Turkish posts on Twitter and 10,000 news articles in three leading Turkish newspaper websites containing influenza related keywords have been analyzed. No strong correlation has been found between influenza related online data and the real world records. Although there is no significant relationship, this study shows that there is a huge amount of data can be harvested from the social web applications such as Twitter.
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