A new public health taxonomy for social listening on respiratory pathogens has been developed by WHO to help analysts align data to search strategies, and understand how public conversations concerning public health topics might change. The taxonomy has already been used for Covid-19 and Mpox, and has now been expanded to include a new taxonomy for respiratory pathogens in line with the WHO Preparedness and Resilience for Emerging Threats (PRET) initiative . The taxonomy provides advice to analysts on how to use it in their work.
The WHO EARS platform was launched in December 2020 to help understand public concern during the Covid-19 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. Over 100 million posts were analysed throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, affording infodemic managers, health authorities and analysts insight into public conversations, concerns and misinformation to help inform a response. The new respiratory pathogen taxonomy has been integrated into WHO EARS and a pilot is being trialled in 30 countries and 17 languages.
This adds to additional WHO tools such as OpenWHO training modules, the WHO/UNICEF Manual on building an infodemic insights Report, and a respiratory pathogen portal on the WHO Early AI-Powered Social Listening Tool (EARS) platform to support pandemic planning.