Gunther Eysenbach is the first Infodemiologist. Why does the world need the JMIR? The Internet – and more specifically, the World-Wide-Web – has an impact on many areas of medicine – broadly we can divide them into “clinical information and telemedicine”, “medical education and information exchange” and “consumer health informatics”: First, Internet protocols are used…
Infodemiology can be defined as the science of distribution and determinants of information in an electronic medium, specifically the Internet, or in a population, with the ultimate aim to inform public health and public policy. Infodemiology data can be collected and analyzed in near real time. Examples for infodemiology applications include: the analysis of queries…
Abstract Background Syndromic surveillance uses health-related data that precede diagnosis and signal a sufficient probability of a case or an outbreak to warrant further public health response. Objective While most syndromic surveillance systems rely on data from clinical encounters with health professionals, I started to explore in 2004 whether analysis of trends in Internet searches…
“We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus, and is just as dangerous” – WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Munich Security Conference on Feb 15, 2020. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines an infodemic as “an over-abundance of information, some accurate and some…