Internet activity as a proxy for vaccination compliance

Yuval Barak-Corren; Ben Y Reis

doi:10.1016/j.vaccine.2015.03.100

Internet activity as a proxy for vaccination compliance

Vaccine. 2015 May 15;33(21):2395-8. doi: 10.1016/j.vaccine.2015.03.100. Epub 2015 Apr 11.

Authors

Yuval Barak-Corren¹, Ben Y Reis²

Affiliations

¹ Predictive Medicine Group, Children's Hospital Boston, 1 Autumn St. Room 540.1, Boston, MA 02115, USA; Technion, Israeli Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel. Electronic address: yuval.barakcorren@childrens.harvard.edu.
² Predictive Medicine Group, Children's Hospital Boston, 1 Autumn St. Room 540.1, Boston, MA 02115, USA; Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA. Electronic address: Ben.Reis@childrens.harvard.edu.

Abstract

Tracking the progress of vaccination campaigns is a challenging and important public health need. Examining a recent Polio outbreak in the Middle East, we show that novel methods utilizing online search trends have great potential to provide a real-time, reliable proxy for vaccination rates over space and time.

Keywords: Internet/utilization; Polio infections/prevention & control; Polio/immunology; Sentinel surveillance; Vaccination/statistics & numerical data.

Publication types

Evaluation Study
Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

MeSH terms

Epidemiologic Methods*
Humans
Internet*
Medication Adherence*
Middle East
Social Media* / statistics & numerical data
Spatio-Temporal Analysis
Vaccination / statistics & numerical data*

Abstract

Publication types

MeSH terms

Grants and funding