Your social media posts could help track food poisoning outbreaks

People love talking about their meals on social media, both good and bad, which is helping officials track cases of food poisoning.

A team of developers at Columbia University's engineering school created a program that hunts for complaints of foodborne illness on Yelp and Twitter. The program is now being used by some major cities to help spot trends.

"Basically, it picks up on keywords and key phrases that you as a person would associate with it, (like) 'I got sick,' or 'I got food poisoning,'" said Columbia engineering student Thomas Effland.

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Some cities, like the New York City Health Department, are now using that information to review the claims. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association showed the program helped detect 10 outbreaks.

Harvard Medical School and health officials in Chicago and Nevada have also tapped into the program.

But as far as letting a single online claim steer restaurant choices, Effland said to take the data with a grain of salt.

"Anybody can write a review, right? So, any individual review is really not enough to make a decision," Effland said.

People who think they were served something that made them sick should contact their local health department. Sharing on social media may seem helpful, but it doesn't make anything official.

"That's not the official route, and you want to make sure that the authorities know so that they can investigate a potential outbreak," said Consumer Reports' Julia Calderone.

Most cases of food poisoning clear up in a few days. Health experts recommend people hold on to any leftovers from a meal in question for possible testing.