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It is possible to discover information about public health trends via social media channels, according to research by scientists from the Johns Hopkins University in America.

Computer scientists Michael J Paul and Mark Drezde conducted the research with a goal to discover the availability of valuable information regarding the publics' health-related issues on social media platforms, if any.

The study focused on microblogging site Twitter, and two billion tweets posted between May and October last year were used for the research.

Paul and Drezde created computer software that was able to separate health-related tweets from the rest. Of the two billion tweets, 1.5 million were health-related.

The scientists were surprised by the results, and Drezde told the Johns Hopkins University paper (The JHU Gazette): 'In some cases, we probably learned some things that even the tweeters' doctors were not aware of, like which over-the-counter medicines the posters were using to treat their symptoms at home.'

The study uncovered a number of worrying results, and some tweets showed that members of the public were taking wrongly-prescribed antibiotics. Paul told the JHU Gazette: 'We found that some people tweeted that they were taking antibiotics for the flu, but antibiotics don't work on the flu, which is a virus, and this practice could contribute to the growing antibiotic resistance problems. So these tweets showed us that some serious medical misperceptions exist out there.'

The scientists found a flaw with their screening process. A tweet such as 'my girlfriend is a real pain in the neck', contains words which would be detected as health-related because of the use of 'pain'. Paul and Drezde adjusted their computer software so that it screened out tweets that were not genuinely health-related.

Paul and Drezde found that similar research would only be made possible if the public was prepared to share their health problems publicly.

There are more Twitter accounts for users in America than anywhere else, and the scientists found that their research would be more valuable if it researched a wider global audience. But with an average of one billion tweets posted to Twitter each week, a wider range of health-related results could be collected if more tweets could be filtered by their computer software.

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