Service of microblogs Twitter is known not only as a place to go for day-to-day updates about people’s lives and celebrity selfies from all over the world, but it could also be used as a health tool, claim researchers from San Diego State University. As informs The Daily Mail, study of tweets with certain words and hashtags help physicians localize the seasonal outbreaks of flu and be prepared to them beforehand.

The research team of scientists from the State University of San Diego has been analyzed almost 170 thousand tweets from about ten cities in the U.S., which they published in six months and which contained the key words "flu" or "influenza". It was found that nine out of 11 cases of a flu outbreak in the city were accompanied by an outbreak of "flu" activity on the social network. Twitter also seemed to be able to predict outbreaks in five of the cities: San Diego, Denver, Jacksonville, Fort Worth and Seattle, as the tweets recorded instances of illness before they were officially documented and reported by cities and counties.

According to the head of the group, a geography professor at Ming-Tzu Syang, social networks today are a new word in the fight against epidemics of influenza and other dangerous diseases.