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Online restaurant reviews identified three foodborne illness outbreaks
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Using online restaurant reviews helped the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene identify three previously unreported outbreaks related to the restaurants, according to a report in MMWR.
“By incorporating website review data into public health surveillance programs, health departments might find additional illnesses and improve detection of foodborne disease outbreaks in the community,” researchers with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) wrote. “Similar programs could be developed to identify other public health hazards that reviewers might describe, such as vermin in food establishments.”
The DOHMH worked with Columbia University and the review website Yelp on a project to identify restaurant reviews that inferred foodborne illness. They developed a program that prospectively analyzed 294,000 Yelp restaurant reviews from July 1, 2012, to March 31, 2013, and used key words to identify potential cases of foodborne illness.
The program identified 893 reviews that were evaluated further by a foodborne disease epidemiologist. Of those, 468 were consistent with foodborne illness. Only 3% of the illnesses had also been reported to the DOHMH. The investigators further investigated 129 of the reviews and 27 of the reviewers were interviewed.
Through the interviews, the investigators identified three restaurant-related outbreaks that were unreported and linked to 16 illnesses. The three restaurants underwent environmental investigations that revealed multiple food-handling violations.
“As social media usage continues to grow among US adults, health departments might consider additional surveillance methods to capture illness reports from those more likely to post a restaurant review online than to contact a health department,” the researchers wrote. “The results suggest that online restaurant reviews might help to identify unreported outbreaks of foodborne illness and restaurants with deficiencies in food handling. However, investigating reports of illness in this manner might require considerable time and resources.”
Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
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