Studying Twitter may be a fruitful way of spotting trends in public health, according to two scientists.
Mark Dredze and Michael Paul say they have shown how the tweeting service can be analysed to detect health trends.
Their analysis showed where flu was occurring and where hay fever was becoming a problem.
They filtered some two billion tweets – from an 18-month period – find one and half million related to health matters.
They say their filtering system can distinguish between hay fever type allergic reactions – and those that affect the skin, causing rashes and hives.
The tweets also provided information about the use of medicines – including people saying they were taking antibiotics for "flu".
They will be reporting their findings to the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in Barcelona, Spain, next week.
Mr Paul, of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, said: "We found that some people tweeted that they were taking antibiotics for the flu. But antibiotics don’t work on the flu, which is a virus, and this practice could contribute to the growing antibiotic resistance problems.
"So these tweets showed us that some serious medical misperceptions exist out there.
"When we started, I didn’t even know if people talked about allergies on Twitter. But we found out that they do."
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