A new public health taxonomy for social listening on respiratory pathogens has been released by the World Health Organisation, alongside other useful tools for infodemic management.

The public health taxonomy for social listening aims to provide a structure allowing an analyst to align data to a search strategy to better understand how the public conversation is changing in relation to a public health topic of interest. The WHO says a taxonomy can help organise and map information to support identification of infodemic insights. Public health taxonomies for social listening have been developed and implemented by WHO for Covid-19 and for mpox.

Now, in-line with the new WHO preparedness and resilience for emerging threats initiative that focuses on pathogens transmitted via respiratory means, a new taxonomy has been developed for social listening on respiratory pathogens. This taxonomy takes a broad view, encompassing viral, bacterial and fungal pathogens across the five taxonomy topic areas of cause, illness, intervention, treatments and information. The new report details the development of the taxonomy and provides advice for analysts looking to incorporate it into their work.

This taxonomy adds to other recent tools produced by the WHO infodemic management team to support pandemic planning including OpenWHO training modules on taxonomy development and other infodemic topics, and a new respiratory pathogen portal on WHO early AI-powered social listening tool platform, which was launched in December 2020 to help to understand public concern during the pandemic.

The platform uses a public health taxonomy to categorise content from online sources such as social media, news articles and blogs, and presents it in real-time. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, over 100m posts were analysed, allowing infodemic managers, health authorities and analysts insight into public conversations, concerns and misinformation to help inform the response.

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