Learning from Tweets: Opportunities and Challenges to Inform Policy Making During Dengue Epidemic

Social media platforms are now prevalent in almost all aspects of our daily lives. Existing work focusing on the intersection between disease surveillance and social media usually puts emphasis on early prediction of diseases. However, there is a dearth of research that explores the utility of social media in public health crises by framing the responses of general public. In this connection, here we study the responses of general public in response to dengue outbreaks in the scarce-resource settings of Bangladesh. Our purpose is to explore the utility of pervasive social media health data in health research in the limited-resource settings of Bangladesh, where the availability and accessibility to government health data is limited. On the other hand, the lower Internet adoption rate in such areas make it difficult to seamlessly integrate such social media platforms in effective disease planning and intervention programs. Therefore, through this study, we aspire to explore the scope of effective policy making approaches based on the social media health data.