Two studies from the UCLA-based University of California Institute for Prediction Technology, in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, found an association between certain risk-related terms that Google and Twitter users researched or tweeted about and subsequent syphilis trends that were reported to the CDC. The researchers were able to pinpoint these cases at state or county levels, depending on the platform used.

"Many of the most significant public health problems in our society today -- HIV and sexually transmitted infections, opioid abuse and cancer -- could be prevented if we had better data on when and where these issues were occurring," said Sean Young, founder and director of the UCLA Center for Digital Behavior and the UC Institute for Prediction Technology. "These two studies suggest that social media and internet search data might help to fix this problem by predicting when and where future syphilis cases may occur. This could be a tool that government agencies such as the CDC might use," added Young, who is also an associate professor of family medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

One study, to be published in the peer-reviewed journal Epidemiology, investigated the association between state-level search queries on Google with primary and secondary syphilis cases -- the earliest and most transmissible stages in the sexually transmitted infection -- that were subsequently reported in these states. Read more via Science Daily