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The sheer number of voices now contributing to the Twitter stream mean it could prove a useful tool in identifying epidemics and pandemics, according to new research by City University in London.

The scientific team hypothesise that Twitter could be an effective way for health officials to detect high regional concentrations of disease, allowing the NHS to allocate resources and also to connect sufferers with nearby doctors and emergency services.

They were able to identify three million tweets posted between May and December last year featuring the word 'flu', with 12,954 containing the phrase 'I have swine flu' and 12,651 saying simply 'I've got flu'.

Patty Kostkova, one of the study's co-authors, said: 'The numbers of tweets we collected by searching by keywords such as 'flu' or 'influenza' has been astronomical.' She speculated that the technology could be of tremendous assistance in disease detection but also insisted that existing disease surveillance systems were better for monitoring the subsequent spread of an epidemic.

Whilst providing welcome flu alerts, Twitter also created a breeding ground for rumours and speculation about the vaccines used to combat the disease. At a conference in Geneva on Tuesday, Keiji Fukuda, influenza chief of the World Health Organisation, noted: 'Anti-vaccine messaging was very active, made it very difficult for public health services in many countries'.

Margaret Chan, director-general of the WHO, demonstrated an eagerness to learn lessons from the handling of the recent swine flu pandemic. 'We want to know what worked well. We want to know what went wrong and, ideally, why. We want to know what can be done better and, ideally, how.'

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