Great interview of Dr. Bechara Choucair, Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health.
Audio here:
Foodborne News
Roundup of news items about our Foodborne Chicago project.
Twitter Bot Helps Chicago Officials Find Dirty Restaurants (Popular Science)
Twitter Bot Helps Chicago Officials Find Dirty Restaurants. Snip:
The Chicago Department of Public Health’s Twitter bot, plus a new online complaint form, helped the department identify 133 restaurants for inspections over a 10-month period. Twenty-one of those restaurants failed inspection and 33 passed with “critical or serious” violations. Not a bad haul.
Read the full article here.
Tweets Identify Food Poisoning Outbreaks – Scientific American
In Chicago monitoring Twitter for reports of food poisoning led to 133 restaurant inspections for health violations, with 21 establishments shut down. Dina Fine Maron reports.
During a 10-month stretch last year, staff members at the health agency responded to 270 tweets about “food poisoning.” Based on those tweets, 193 complaints were filed and 133 restaurants in the city were inspected. Twenty-one were closed down and another 33 were forced to fix health violations. That’s according to a study in the journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.[Jenine K. Harris et al, Health Department Use of Social Media to Identify Foodborne Illness — Chicago, Illinois, 2013–2014]
Foodborne Chicago on MeatPoultry.com: EXCLUSIVE: Foodborne illness in the age of Twitter
Here’s an article in a leading industry magazine about Foodborne Chicago. Snip:
An added benefit for public health agencies is that FoodBorne Chicago is an open-source framework, which will enable other health departments adopt the application free of charge, Harris said. Richardson said the cost of developing the FoodBorne Chicago program was “minimal between staff time and a few nominal costs for the server, the URL and things like that.”
Foodborne Chicago Covered in Food Poisoning Bulletin
Here’s some more coverage today from the food safety industry: New Twitter App Tracks Foodborne Illness Outbreaks in Chicago. Snip:
We’ve told you before about apps that can help keep you safe from food poisoning, and how Twitter may be playing a role in foodborne illess outbreak investigations. Now a company in Chicago has created a new Twitter app called Foodborne Chicago. The project is part of the Smart Chicago Collaborative, an organization “devoted to improving lives in Chicago through technology.”
The app asks people who think they contracted food poisoning at a restaurant to fill out a form, which is sent to the Chicago Department of Public Health. The app also uses computer codes to search Twitter for anything relating to food poisoning in the Chicago area. People review the tweets and reply back to people who posted about them, asking them to fill out the web form. The form asks which restaurant the person believes is linked to the illness, what the person ate, and when they got sick.
Cory Nissen and Joe Olson in Food Safety News re: Foodborne Chicago
More than 70 complaints have been submitted since Foodborne Chicago’s April launch, but not all submissions were driven through Twitter interactions.
“Outside of Twitter, a lot of people are finding this form randomly as a way of logging an incident of food poisoning,” said Cory Nissen, one of the app’s developers.
Nissen and Joe Olson, another developer behind the project, emphasized that a receptive and open city health department is needed to get a project such as Foodborne Chicago off the ground.
Full story on @foodsafetynews: Social Media Apps Use Twitter to Track Illness Outbreaks
