Social media and medicines information; impact on antibiotics misunderstanding and misuse

A further thought on the impact of social media on health care and health information comes from a study today in the USA. A report in the American Journal of Infection Control, titled Dissemination of health information through social networks: Twitter and antibiotics.

Speaking on "Good Morning America", the study's co-author Daniel Scanfeld said: "When we looked at tweets...we found that there are some basic categories like general mentioning of antibiotics or complaints about side effects and things like that, but there was also a category that was pretty interesting, where people were indicating misuse or misunderstanding of antibiotics."

According to the blog page of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), he added that "one tweet indicating misuse of antibiotics could be spread potentially to hundreds of thousands of people via the Twitter network."