As small-town newspapers across America close up shop, unable to compete for ad dollars in an increasingly online world, STAT News reports on an unexpected danger presented by that decline: Local newspapers are a key research tool for infectious disease survellance.
“We rely very heavily on local news. And I think what this will probably mean is that there are going to be pockets of the U.S. where we’re just not going to have a particularly good signal anymore,” said Majumder, a Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Majumder is a computational epidemiology research fellow at HealthMap, a 12-year-old disease detection project run by researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital. The website uses nontraditional data sources — reports from local news outlets and social media platforms among them— to track global infectious disease activity in real time. [...]
“Local media is the bedrock of internet surveillance — the kind of work that we do in terms of scouring the web looking for early signs of something taking place in a community,” explained Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s and a pioneer in the field of using sources other than public health data to do this type of work.
Local reporting was used by researchers to uncover an emerging epidemic in, among other cases, the Mexico-U.S. "swine flu" outbreak. As local news in America dwindles, researchers worry that the resulting data gaps will result in new outbreaks going undetected until they have escalated beyond local level; the newspapers provide not just important local context, but are valuable because the reports are, unlike social media reports, more accurate.
“With Twitter … you are picking up a signal, but that signal might not be precise,” said Alessandro Vespignani, a professor at Northeastern University whose research focuses on modeling of epidemics. And social media reports can be simply wrong, he said — either by accident or design. News coverage “anchors” the signals picked up on social media, Vespignani said.
It's worth a read. What researchers don't have as of yet, however, are solutions.