During epidemic outbreaks of infectious diseases, official figures on the spread of disease can often take weeks to be collected and released, delaying epidemiologic assessment. Informal media sources have been shown to be accurate metrics for “predicting present activity” in economics, sales, disease prevalence, and consumer activity. Recently, researchers looked into using similar methods in times of disease outbreak. They studied the correlation between formal government reported cholera cases and those collected by informal sources on the internet during the Haitian cholera outbreak of 2010.
