3). The distribution of implicated foods across these categories was extremely similar with identical proportions observed for the dairy–eggs (23%), and fruits–nuts (7%) categories. The other food categories had a 1% to 4% difference between Yelp and CDC. We then further disaggregated the data by year and focused on nineteen specific categories based on Fig. 2. Rankings of the frequency of the nineteen food categories (shown in Table A.4) were positively correlated, with a mean of 0.78. The correlations

for 2006 through 2011 were 0.60, 0.85, 0.85, 0.80, 0.77, and 0.79, respectively, with p < 0.01 for each year. We also present the proportion of foods within each category in Table 2. Lastly, we focused on illness reports from 2009 through 2011 since the most illness reports were noted during this period, as previously stated. The most frequently implicated HKI-272 manufacturer groups for 2009–2011 were beef (6.30% Yelp, 9.12% CDC), dairy (11.67% Yelp, 13.30% CDC), grains–beans (29.19% Yelp, 19.73% CDC), poultry (9.37% Yelp, 9.57% CDC) and vine-stalk (8.14% Yelp, 10.16% CDC). In this study, we assessed reports of foodborne illness in foodservice reviews as a possible data source for disease click here surveillance. We observed that reports of foodborne illness

on Yelp were sometimes extremely detailed, which could be useful for monitoring foodborne illness and outbreaks. We also located clusters of reports for particular restaurants, some of which had health safety violations related to food handling and hygiene. This suggests that tracking reviews in near real-time could reveal clusters useful for outbreak detection. Most importantly, Farnesyltransferase we found that foods implicated in foodborne illness reports on Yelp correlated with foods implicated in reports from the CDC. This could be useful for identifying food vehicles for attribution and estimation of the extent of foodborne illness. Additionally, institutions and foodservices are considered principal locations for foodborne outbreaks (McCabe-Sellers and Beattie, 2004), and studies suggest that Americans are increasingly consuming

food outside the home (Nielsen et al., 2002 and Poti and Popkin, 2011), which could lead to increased exposure to pathogens associated with foodborne illness. Approximately 44% and 3.4% of outbreaks contained in the CDC FOOD dataset were suspected or confirmed to be associated with restaurants and schools, respectively. A better understanding of foods and locations typically implicated in reports of foodborne illness is therefore needed in order to improve surveillance and food safety. Although this data source could be useful for monitoring foodborne illness, there are several limitations in the data and the analysis. First, the incubation periods differ for different foodborne diseases, which can lead to misleading reports on time and source of infection. Second, some reports are delayed by several weeks or months, which could be challenging for surveillance.