Sick Yelpers Lead Inspectors To Tainted NYC Restaurants

NEW YORK, NY — Amateur restaurant critics on Yelp are helping New York City inspectors spot food poisoning outbreaks, city officials said Wednesday. The Department of Health has spotted 10 cases of foodborne illnesses since 2012 using a computer program that scans the popular review website for red flags at eateries, officials said.

The program developed with Columbia University's Department of Computer Science has spotted about 1,500 food-poisoning complaints a year since July 2012, health officials said.

Social media outlets like Yelp and Twitter are important tools in spotting health code violations, officials said. The program found 468 Yelp reviews over the course of nine months that described food poisoning, but only 3 percent of them were reported to the city's 311 complaint system, according to a study of the program published Wednesday in the Journal of American Medical Informatics Association.

The 8,500 complaints the Yelp program has spotted since 2012 accounted for about a third of the 28,000 food-poisoning complaints the Department of Health received in that time period.

"Effective information extraction regarding foodborne illness from social media is of high importance — online restaurant review sites are popular and many people are more likely to discuss food poisoning incidents in such sites than on official government channel," Luis Gravano and Daniel Hsu, Columbia computer science professors who co-authored the study with Department of Health epidemiologists, said in a statement.

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The program scans new Yelp reviews every day for key words and phrases — such as "sick," "vomit" and "diarrhea" — that suggest someone suffered food poisoning after eating at a restuarant, the study says. It also flags locations where there have been multiple reports that could suggest an outbreak of foodborne illness.

While it's not always perfect, the program lets the Department of Health "monitor millions of reviews, a previously impossible task, to aid in the identification and investigation of foodborne illness outbreaks" in the city," the study says.

"The incorporation of new data sources allows us to detect outbreaks that may not have been reported and for the earlier identification of outbreaks to prevent more New Yorkers from becoming sick," Vasudha Reddy and Katelynn Devinney, two Department of Health epidemiologists who co-authored the study, said in a statement.

The Department of Health investigates every food poisoning complaint it receives. Undercooked eggs and meat and unpasteurized dairy are the prime culprits of food poisoning in New York City, health officials say. Dirty fruits and vegetables can also make diners sick.

Food poisoning kills 3,000 people and causes 48 million sicknesses across the nation each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates.

Even with its new tools, the Department of Health encourages New Yorkers to report food poisoning to 311 and call a doctor if they have a high fever, prolonged vomiting or diarrhea, blood in the stool or dehydration.

(Lead image: Yelp's East Coast headquarters in New York City is pictured in 2011. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)