A new public health taxonomy for social listening on respiratory
pathogens has been released alongside other useful tools for infodemic
management.
The public health taxonomy for social listening
provides a structure allowing an analyst to align data to a search
strategy to better understand how the public conversation is changing in
relation to a public health topic of interest. A taxonomy can help
organize and map information to support identification of infodemic
insights. Public health taxonomies for social listening have been
developed and implemented by WHO for COVID-19 and for mpox.
Now, in-line with the new WHO that focuses on pathogens transmitted via respiratory means, a new taxonomy has been developed for on Respiratory Pathogens.
This taxonomy takes a broad view, encompassing viral, bacterial and
fungal pathogens across the five taxonomy topic areas of the cause,
illness, intervention, treatments and information. The new report
details the development of the taxonomy and provides advice for analysts
looking to incorporate it into their work.
This taxonomy adds to other recent tools produced by the WHO infodemic management team to support pandemic planning including modules on taxonomy development and other infodemic topics, the report, and a new respiratory pathogen portal on platform.
The WHO EARS platform was launched in December 2020 to help to understand
public concern during the pandemic. The platform uses a public health
taxonomy to categorise content from online sources such as social media,
news articles and blogs, and presents it in real-time. Throughout the
COVID-19 pandemic, over 100 million posts were analysed, allowing
infodemic managers, health authorities and analysts insight into public
conversation’s, concerns and misinformation to help inform the response.
The new respiratory pathogen taxonomy has been integrated into WHO EARS and
a pilot is being trialled with 30 countries and 17 languages. The
public facing allows all users to see where conversations are escalating, what people
are talking publicly about the most, and if there are information voids
or gender differences in conversations. A new social indicators panel
tracks social change and provides indication of how conversations may be
changing. A comprehensive back-end with increased functionality is
available for use by regional and country WHO teams to inform and guide
their Infodemic response.
The pivot of the WHO EARS platform from
COVID-19 to respiratory pathogens demonstrates the ability of this
innovative platform to continue to support social listening across
different areas of pandemic and infodemic preparedness. Ongoing testing
and iterations on the platform, including review of countries and
languages, will ensure the approach remains relevant and useful.
Photo credit: WHO/Sam Bradd
