Hi.
I'm Farhana Shahid, an incoming PhD student at Cornell.
Today I'm very excited to share about our recent work
on dengue epidemic in Bangladesh.
Our paper is titled, "Learning from Tweets, Opportunities
and Challenges to Inform Policy Making During Dengue Epidemic."
The novel coronavirus pandemic has captured our attention
throughout the year.
Infectious diseases have been around us all along.
Dengue is the most critical infectious disease
that ravages the countries worldwide almost every year.
In 2019, dengue infected countless people
across the globe.
However, the low-resource countries
are hit hard in the face of such infectious diseases.
Poor government infrastructure, poor access
to government health data complicate this crisis response
plan within low-resource communities.
Even social media based disease surveillance
is difficult within these regions
due to low internet penetration and poor adoption
of social media services.
In the face of these challenges, we
turn our attention to the 2019 dengue pandemic in Bangladesh.
Through our work, we addressed two research questions--
what can dengue related tweets reliably tell us
about the public health issues in Bangladesh,
and how Twitter data can guide public health policy regarding
the epidemic in Bangladesh.
To find an answer, we collected around 28,000
dengue related tweets in the context of Bangladesh
using TweetScraper.
Then we applied biterm topic model
to identify the topics that captured public attention
during the epidemic.
Besides, we used different text mining techniques
to extract information about locations, hospitals,
number of dengue cases, and blood donation requirements
for critical dengue patients.
In addition, we collected dengue related data
from government health reports.
For more details, please check out the methods section
of our paper.
[?] reveals several interesting observations.
For example, for some areas, we found
Twitter data reported more cases of data
than that of the government reports.
But in the [?] sources of these tweets,
we found they were reported from the Twitter accounts
of local news and print media.
Besides analyzing the tweets, we observed a significant rise
in the cases of dengue following Eid ul-Adha,
which is one of the largest religious festivals
among the Muslims worldwide.
During this time, people travel to celebrate
Eid with their family members and relatives,
and with people, infectious diseases travel too.
Moreover, we found women died more often than men.
And when we analyzed the blood donation related tweets,
we observed significantly greater demand
for Rh negative blood groups during dengue epidemic
than that of the non-epidemic periods.
Apart from this, there are other interesting findings
from our work.
To learn more, please have a look at our main paper.
Now, it is tantamount to the implications of these findings,
that in many cases, through the data
can reveal the shortcomings in government health reports.
Given the scarcity of resources within low-income countries,
there are often cases of underreporting
for the rural areas, Integrating and verifying information
from trusted news media can give us
a better picture of the epidemic across the country.
Besides, our findings reveal high transmission
of dengue following Eid, though it's
difficult for the government to restrict travel during Eid,
given the sensitivity of the religious context.
However, the government can strengthen measures
at bus and train stations because a recent government
survey revealed high density of [?] at these places.
So public awareness should be raised so that symptomatic
never travel during this time.
Moreover, dengue related tweets can review the local areas that
are highly infected, and such low-level data
is really missing in government reports.
Governments can utilize this data
to reallocate its limited resources
to highly infected areas.
Our analysis of personal blood donation requests on Twitter
suggests that blood banks should focus
on the reserve of Rh negative blood groups
during dengue epidemic.
Besides, public narrative about dengue on Twitter
reveal several shortcomings in dengue diagnosis and treatment
facilities.
This can help the government identify areas
for improvement and regulation.
This is all from us today.
If you have more query about our work,
please feel free to reach us either during discussion
or via email.
Thank you.