As fears of swine flu spread across the world, two University of North Texas graduate students have been using the recent outbreak’s effect on society to further their studies.

Courtney Corley and Jorge Reyes have been tracking the spread of swine flu by finding mentions of flu and swine flu on English- and Spanish-language online social media, such as blogs, that are dated since October, when the infection began.

DRC/Barron Ludlum

University of North Texas doctoral students Courtney Corley and Jorge Reyes, who are tracking the spread of swine flu in the United States and Mexico, are shown Wednesday on campus.

View larger More photos Photo store

Corley said one goal is to create a surveillance system that could possibly help detect patterns that may lead to future outbreaks.

Both are pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science and engineering while working at UNT’s Center for Computational Epidemiology, which develops tools to accurately predict the dynamics of infectious outbreaks.

The original goal of the work was monitoring and surveillance of seasonal influenza, but the project morphed into a swine flu study, Corley said.

“We’re looking at what people write in blogs, Web [sites] and social media like Facebook, YouTube, etc. But, in particular, we’re just using blogs,” Corley said. “We have a service that allows us access to all blogs written in whatever language.”

The service is called Spinn3r, and allows them to pull together all media across the Internet that contains the keywords they search for.

“It’s a really rich resource to use for public health to see what people are writing about,” he said. “It’s a massive amount of data. Jorge and I for the past week have been looking at all the blogs that talk about swine flu. There are many words in Spanish for swine flu, so Jorge has been able to navigate that.”

Reyes, who is from Mexico, said he was motivated to work on the project because his family was in the country where the virus originated.

“All my family was there, I was worried,” Reyes said. “We were like, ‘what could we do with the tools we have?’ My motivation was to try and find something useful to help people.”

Corley said the hard work has been locating hotspots where people became ill, how long ago they wrote about their symptoms and discerning a pattern from that.

He added that data was hard to find in some parts of Mexico because social and economic issues prohibit some people from writing blogs.

In those cases, the two depended on press releases for information and whether the disease was contained, Corley said.

The first step of the data download is complete, Corley said, and the two are now sifting through it to separate swine flu cases from reports of other illnesses.

They spend anywhere from two to three hours a day sifting through the data, but progress has slowed because they have to study for finals.

“The big thing is we have our framework set up where we can get our information,” Corley said.

He said he would like to see more content developed to aid in real-time surveillance of disease outbreaks.

He said the negative impacts of the swine flu, especially the deaths in Mexico and the United States, could motivate that.

“There’s more of a buzz. It’s important to more people. People may be more conscious about their surroundings, environment, families and health of family,” Corley said. “Now that we have this event hopefully behind us, we can fine-tune our surveillance and more accurately follow [outbreak] events.”

BJ LEWIS can be reached at 940-566-6875. His e-mail is blewis@dentonrc.com.