It’s one thing to track pop culture trends via social media numbers. The number of followers of Charlie Sheen’s Twitter account grew exponentially once he joined the site to report on all his “winning” and “Tiger blood” during his 2011 meltdown.  Twitter users have also broken big news stories before. The assassination of Osama bin Laden was inadvertently reported first on Twitter, and last year, Egyptians utilized Twitter to communicate and promote their uprising.

Now health care officials are learning how to use Twitter to keep up with epidemics and health scares.

Utilizing searches for the words cholera and #cholera during 2010, researchers discovered that Twitter’s timeline revealed the outbreak in Haiti following the devastating earthquake there two weeks before doctors acknowledged the disease spreading through the communities.

Now comes the job of figuring out how to implement the knowledge that can be learned from such a search.

“We can definitely use these sources to get early information about how a disease is spreading, and consequently help inform control or response efforts sooner,” says the lead author, Rumi Chunara, Ph.D., of the report published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

Let’s just hope there are no Fail Whales showing up during the next big epidemic.

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