Wikipedia and Epidemic Outbreaks
This article is written about a new study from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. After examining 14 disease outbreaks in nine countries, this study shows that Wikipedia “may have prophetic tendencies in the world of infectious diseases.” In summary, researchers have noticed that the amount of page-views about the disease has peaked before the outbreak and therefore try to find the underlying reason behind the search. One possible explanation for this, according to the article, is that people may start to research their symptoms to see if matched up with a certain disease. This data most strongly predicted influenza in the United States, due to high levels of Internet use. However, a limitation of this study is that it was harder to track the outbreak of HIV/aids because it was a slower moving condition, in addition to the fact that these diseases often tend to outbreak in areas with little internet access. The takeaway for this is that nothing moves faster than the Internet, and having this data correlation may be another preventative measure for the outbreak of certain diseases and potential outbreaks.
This directly relates to concepts in Networks because it highlights the cascade effect of knowledge and information, as well as epidemics. For example, if someone is feeling as though they are under the weather and they feel as though they’ve heard about the disease either on the news or heard from other people, they may be feel as though they are getting the disease, and therefore search for it. This may also lead to the study of epidemics. Patterns are recorded and can almost be predicted by the Wikipedia use of page views. Since both diseases and the diffusion of ideas can spread from person to person, across similar kinds of networks that connect people, in this case, Wikipedia, it is clear that this spread of ideas/diseases can be referred to as a “Social Contagion,” quite literally. One person searches for a disease on Wikipedia and they believe they have it and tell their friends, then their friend will search, and maybe get in contact with them which will further lead to increased incidence of disease and increased page views- a correlation.
http://mic.com/articles/104546/scientists-are-about-to-use-wikipedia-to-fight-global-epidemics
http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003892