Infodemiology and Infoveillance: An Overview
Social media interactions and discourse can impact, to a great extent, people’s behaviours and decisions around various public health issues such as COVID-19 vaccination. Similarly, analyzing people's internet search behaviour regarding health-related information and social media use can guide real-time surveillance of emerging diseases and help predict epidemics. In this context, examining social media interactions to understand the drivers and impact of infodemics and potential interventions to mitigate the impact of infodemics is essential for the success of public health initiatives and pandemic preparedness. Concurrently, digital data can be used for real time digital disease surveillance, which can be instrumental for pandemic preparedness, planning and control.
Dr. Zahid Butt is a physician and infectious disease epidemiologist with over 20 years of public health experience. He is an Assistant professor in the School of Public Health Sciences at the University of Waterloo. His research applies a ‘syndemic’ framework to examine inter-relationships between epidemics of infectious diseases, social disparities, co-morbidities, and substance use, using epidemiological, statistical, spatial and machine learning methods. His other areas of interest include digital public health, global health, and spatial epidemiologic methods and their application to public health practice. Dr. Butt’s research activities to date have led to 196 peer-reviewed publications and more than 100 presentations at scholarly meetings in the domain of public health, big data analytics and spatial epidemiology, including papers in high impact peer-reviewed journals such as The Lancet, Lancet infectious diseases, Nature, BMJ, Lancet Global Health, etc. Dr. Butt is an associate editor for BMC Public Health and section editor in chief of infectious disease epidemiology section at IJERPH. He has also worked internationally in the development sector with WHO and UNICEF.
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We thank the Graduate Studies Endowment Fund (GSEF) and Waterloo.AI supports for this program.