Online reports of foodborne illness capture foods implicated in official foodborne outbreak reports.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

Traditional surveillance systems capture only a fraction of the estimated 48 million yearly cases of foodborne illness in the United States. We assessed whether foodservice reviews on Yelp.com (a business review site) can be used to support foodborne illness surveillance efforts.

Methods

We obtained reviews from 2005 to 2012 of 5824 foodservice businesses closest to 29 colleges. After extracting recent reviews describing episodes of foodborne illness, we compared implicated foods to foods in outbreak reports from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Results

Broadly, the distribution of implicated foods across five categories was as follows: aquatic (16% Yelp, 12% CDC), dairy-eggs (23% Yelp, 23% CDC), fruits-nuts (7% Yelp, 7% CDC), meat-

SUBMITTER: Nsoesie EO 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4167574 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature