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