Twitter Could Be Used To Track, And Prevent, HIV Outbreaks [STUDY]

Twitter has often been looked to as a way to improve and monitor public health, from researchers uncovering vaccine trends to tracking flu outbreaks. Now, a new research team has developed a method for tracking HIV outbreaks and drug use behavior using tweets.

Published in Preventative Medicine by UCLA researchers, this latest study examined the content of tweets to determine where potential HIV outbreaks might occur.

As PsychCentral describes, researchers collected over 550 million tweets between May 26 and December 9 2012.