Infodemiology and infoveillance: framework for contagious exanthematous diseases, of childhood in Italy

ABSTRACT

Background

Contagious exanthematous diseases are becoming a major public health problem. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the potential epidemiological trend of four infectious exanthematous diseases in Italy through the searches on the internet.

Methods

We used the following Italian search term: ‘Sesta malattia’ (Sixth Disease, in English), ‘Eritema Infettivo’ (also knows ‘Quinta malattia’ in Italian; Fifth Disease in English), ‘Quarta malattia’ (Fourth Disease in English) and ‘Scarlattina’ (Scarlet fever in English). We overlapped Google Trends and Wikipedia data to perform a linear regression and correlation analysis. Statistical analyses were performed using the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient (rho). The study period is between July 2015 and December 2022

Results

The diseases considered have a seasonal trend and the search peaks between GT and Wikipedia overlap. A temporal correlation was observed between GT and Wikipedia search trends. Google Trends Internet search data showed strong correlation with Wikipedia with a rho statistically significant for Fifth disease (rho = 0.78), Fourth disease (rho = 0.76) and Scarlet-fever (rho = 0.77), moderate correlation for Sixth disease (rho = 0.32).

Conclusions

Infectious disease searches using Google and Wikipedia can be useful for public health surveillance and help policy makers implement prevention and information programs for the population, in addition to the fact that increases in searches could represent an early warning in the detection of outbreaks.

KEYWORDS:

• Sixth disease
• fifth disease
• fourth disease
• scarlet fever
• infodemiology
• infoveillance
• Italy
• digital epidemiology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Authors contribution

OES conceptualized, OES designed the study, OES performed data analysis and data extraction. SP, OES, VG wrote the first draft. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. All authors reviewed the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.