Brief Report
Amplification of perceived risk among users of a national travel health Web site during the 2013-2016 West African Ebola virus outbreak

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2017.11.012Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Timely information was key to the travel health sector during the Ebola virus outbreak.

  • Data on information seeking behaviors carry potential for surveillance.

  • Traffic to a travel health Web site showed early and sustained interest in the outbreak.

  • This suggests potential for a syndromic surveillance system.

Timely outbreak information was paramount to public health bodies issuing travel advisories during the 2013-2016 West Africa Ebola virus outbreak. This article explores the potential for a syndromic system/Shewhart control chart based on the online interaction with a national travel health Web site in comparison with searches on the Google UK search engine. The study showed an amplification of perceived risk among users of a national travel health Web site months before the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and the initial surge in public interest on Google UK in August 2014.

Section snippets

Methods

The National Travel Health Network and Centre (NaTHNaC) is a government body supporting travel health services in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The main information channel is its Web site (TravelHealthPro.org.uk).7

In total, the NaTHNaC issued 28 EBV-related travel advisories between March 24, 2014, and January 9, 2015.

Weekly counts of unique pageviews (views from here on) of EBV-related pages versus all pages were extracted from Google Analytics from March 2013-December 2014. The

Results

The time trend of EBV-related searches showed an earlier interest on the professional Web site compared with Google UK (Fig 1). The Shewhart chart showed all weeks from March 30-December 31, 2014, as out of control relative to baseline (Fig 2).

Discussion

Online information seeking activity has been shown to wax and wane as new information on threats becomes available and satisfy gaps in knowledge. The mechanism behind the initial bursts of information seeking has been termed the social amplification of risk.2 Several studies have explored the social amplification of risk mechanism for early detection of disease outbreaks using online information sources, including search engines9, 10, 11, 12, 13; social media networks such as Twitter10, 11, 14,

Conclusions

The study showed an amplification of perceived risk among users of a national travel health Web site months before the PHEIC and the initial surge in public interest on Google UK in August 2014. This suggests a potential for tools predicting periods of high demand on travel health services by detecting changes in online information seeking behaviors. Such tools may facilitate early identification of incidents, allowing the timely preparation of appropriate public and travel health messages to

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  • Cited by (0)

    Conflicts of interest: None to report.

    Author contributions: J.P., H.S., and D.P. were closely involved with the design, conduct, analysis, presentation, and interpretation of the study findings.

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