The World Health Organization (WHO) has published a new public health taxonomy for social listening to support pandemic planning and preparedness for pandemic influenza and respiratory pathogen disease events. The new social listening on respiratory pathogens outlines the development of the taxonomy and offers advice for analysts planning to incorporate it into their work.
Respiratory pathogens consist of viruses, bacteria, or other organisms that cause respiratory tract illness, including the lungs, nose, and throat. Major respiratory pathogens include influenza, COVID-19, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
The taxonomy provides a structure for analysts to align data with a search strategy and further understand how public conversations have changed about public health topics of interest. Taxonomies support the identification of infodemic insights by organizing and mapping relative information. Previously, WHO has developed and implemented public health taxonomies for social listening for COVID-19 and mpox.
In line with WHO’s new Preparedness and Resilience for Emerging Threats (PRET) initiative, the new taxonomy on respiratory pathogens provides a broad view of viral, bacterial, and fungal pathogens across the five taxonomy topic areas: cause, illness, intervention, treatments, and information. PRET incorporates tools and approaches for shared learning and collective action learned during the COVID-19 pandemic and other recent health emergencies to support countries in critically reviewing, testing, and updating their respiratory pandemic planning efforts.
The new taxonomy builds upon recent tools produced by the WHO infodemic management team for pandemic planning support, including the WHO Early AI-Powered Social Listening Tools (EARS) platform, launched in 2020. Others include the WHO/UNICEF 'How to build an infodemic insights report in 6 steps' and the OpenWHO training modules on taxonomy development and other infodemic topics.
The new respiratory pathogen taxonomy has been included in the WHO EARS platform, and a pilot is currently being trialed in 30 countries and 17 languages to track social change and provide indications of how conversations may be changing.
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