ECDC launches episomer, a tool that turns social media signals into early public health action

The tool allows users to automatically monitor trends in social media posts based on time, place and topic, allowing for the early detection of potential public health threats, for example by spotting unusual increases in discussions related to infectious diseases. 

Vicky Lefevre, Head of Surveillance, Preparedness and Response at ECDC, says: 

‘Social media monitoring remains a valuable source of information for epidemic intelligence. Episomer ensures we can continue to leverage this capacity by building on ECDC’s established methods to monitor social media data sources, supporting early warning and situational awareness for public health’.

Episomer is an R-based tool that collects posts from Bluesky using its public API and can be extended to other social media platforms, providing flexible support for social media-based early warning and signal detection.

While primarily designed for infectious disease surveillance, episomer can be adapted to all hazards or other fields of study by modifying monitored topics and keywords.

It builds on the objectives and core functionalities of ECDC’s epitweetr tool, which collected Twitter data, and has been adapted to reflect changes in social media data accessibility. 

Episomer includes an interactive web application that supports data exploration, signal detection, alert review and configuration, and is freely available as an open-source R package under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL).

By adapting epitweetr to a new data environment, episomer ensures that ECDC continues to support public health experts and researchers using social media as part of epidemic intelligence and early warning systems.