Using Social Networking Sites for Communicable Disease Control: Innovative Contact Tracing or Breach of Confidentiality?
Mandeville, Kate L;
Harris, Matthew;
Thomas, H Lucy;
Chow, Yimmy;
Seng, Claude;
(2014)
Using Social Networking Sites for Communicable Disease Control: Innovative Contact Tracing or Breach of Confidentiality?
Public health ethics, 7 (1).
pp. 47-50.
ISSN 1754-9973
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/phe/pht023
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Social media applications such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have attained huge popularity, with more than three billion people and organizations predicted to have a social networking account by 2015. Social media offers a rapid avenue of communication with the public and has potential benefits for communicable disease control and surveillance. However, its application in everyday public health practice raises a number of important issues around confidentiality and autonomy. We report here a case from local level health protection where the friend of an individual with meningococcal septicaemia used a social networking site to notify potential contacts.
