The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has launched a new open-source tool, called episomer, designed to help public health teams spot potential disease threats by monitoring social media posts.
Episomer automatically tracks trends in posts by time, place and topic, allowing users to detect unusual increases in discussions linked to infectious diseases, according to ECDC's release issued on Wednesday.
“Social media monitoring remains a valuable source of information for epidemic intelligence,” Vicky Lefevre, Head of Surveillance, Preparedness and Response at ECDC, said. “Episomer ensures we can continue to leverage this capacity.”
The tool is built in R, a programming language widely used for data analysis, and collects posts from Bluesky using the platform’s public API — a way for software to access publicly available data.
It can be extended to other social media platforms.
Replacing ECDC’s retired epitweetr tool
Episomer replaces ECDC’s earlier social media monitoring tool, epitweetr, which has been retired and previously collected data from Twitter, according to the agency.
The new system includes an interactive web app to explore data, detect signals, review alerts and adjust settings.
Although it was designed for infectious disease surveillance, episomer can be adapted to “all hazards” by changing the topics and keywords it monitors.
