Making the most of a brave new world: opportunities and considerations for using Twitter as a public health monitoring tool.

Abstract

This paper outlines a commentary response to an article published by Young and colleagues in Preventive Medicine that evaluated the feasibility of using Twitter as a surveillance and monitoring took for HIV. We draw upon the broader literature on disease surveillance and public health prevention using social media and broader considerations of epidemiological and surveillance methods to provide readers with necessary considerations for using social media in epidemiology and surveillance.