Using Baidu Index Data to Improve Chickenpox Surveillance in Yunnan, China: Infodemiology Study.

BACKGROUND

Chickenpox is an old but easily neglected infectious disease. Although chickenpox is preventable by vaccines, vaccine breakthroughs often occur, and the chickenpox epidemic is on the rise. Chickenpox is not included in the list of regulated communicable diseases that must be reported and controlled by public and health departments; therefore, it is crucial to rapidly identify and report varicella outbreaks during the early stages. The Baidu index (BDI) can supplement the traditional surveillance system for infectious diseases, such as brucellosis and dengue, in China. The number of reported chickenpox cases and internet search data also showed a similar trend. BDI can be a useful tool to display the outbreak of infectious diseases.

OBJECTIVE

This study aimed to develop an efficient disease surveillance method that uses BDI to assist in traditional surveillance.

METHODS

Chickenpox incidence data (weekly from January 2017 to June 2021) reported by the Yunnan Province Center for Disease Control and Prevention were obtained to evaluate the relationship between the incidence of chickenpox and BDI. We applied a support vector machine regression (SVR) model and a multiple regression prediction model with BDI to predict the incidence of chickenpox. In addition, we used the SVR model to predict the number of chickenpox cases from June 2021 to the first week of April 2022.

RESULTS

The analysis showed that there was a close correlation between the weekly number of newly diagnosed cases and the BDI. In the search terms we collected, the highest Spearman correlation coefficient was 0.747. Most BDI search terms, such as "chickenpox," "chickenpox treatment," "treatment of chickenpox," "chickenpox symptoms," and "chickenpox virus," trend consistently. Some BDI search terms, such as "chickenpox pictures," "symptoms of chickenpox," "chickenpox vaccine," and "is chickenpox vaccine necessary," appeared earlier than the trend of "chickenpox virus." The 2 models were compared, the SVR model performed better in all the applied measurements: fitting effect, R

CONCLUSIONS

These findings indicated that the BDI in Yunnan Province can predict the incidence of chickenpox in the same period. Thus, the BDI is a useful tool for monitoring the chickenpox epidemic and for complementing traditional monitoring systems.

Informations de copyright

©Zhaohan Wang, Jun He, Bolin Jin, Lizhi Zhang, Chenyu Han, Meiqi Wang, Hao Wang, Shuqi An, Meifang Zhao, Qing Zhen, Shui Tiejun, Xinyao Zhang. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 16.05.2023.