After a young man fired off on Twitter about his recent food poisoning incident, health officials are urging people, who identify themselves as Chicagoans, to tweet their incidents, including the words "food poisoning," according to the Chicago Tribune.
The health department said more than 150 Chicagoans have been contacted since the initiative, called "Foodborne Chicago," began. The first month reports triggered 33 restaurant inspections, some of which uncovered violations, officials said.
"We wanted to try to reach out to Chicagoans in many different ways, and we know that a lot of people are on Twitter," Health Commissioner Dr. Bechara Choucair told the Tribune. "If they are experiencing food-related illness, they won't always pick up the phone and call us, but they will tweet it."
According to the Tribune, Foodborne Chicago, which tweets as @foodbornechi, was developed by Smart Chicago Collaborative, which describes itself as "a civic organization devoted to improving lives in Chicago through technology" and counts the city of Chicago as a founding partner.
In the past couple of years, officials have placed all health department inspections online, nearly in real time, and posted progress on various health initiatives on a regular basis.
"If the health department is using it for people to say, 'Hi, I suspect I just got sick from this restaurant' or 'I just went to this place and it's just a mess,' then I don't see a problem with doing inspections based on that," said Food safety attorney Bill Marler said, according to the Tribune. "They should be doing inspections anyway. So it's probably no more or less accurate to use inspections to respond to a consumer complaint, even if the consumer might be incorrect. They are either going to find a problem or not find it."
The Illinois Restaurant Association said it had no complaints.
"There is nothing more important than food safety in our restaurants," association President Sam Toia said in a statement, according to the Tribune.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stated foodborne pathogens can trigger symptoms of illness a few minutes to several weeks after contaminated food is ingested, which makes it tricky to pinpoint the source of food poisoning.
Some Chicago tweeters who heard from Foodborne Chicago said hoped that tweeting would protect other people and help identify larger outbreaks.
"Food poisoning can be kind of vague, so whether or not they use social media, it is going to be difficult to find claims that have provable grounds," said Nicole Rohr, an interactive content producer at WYCC-Ch. 20 who got sick in May, according to the Tribune. "But it's worth looking into, especially if there is an establishment where multiple people get sick. That's when I think it can be really helpful."
Marler agreed that explicit tweets with locations and symptoms could help connect the dots.
"If they get enough red flags about one specific restaurant, that can show that they need to pop on by and do another inspection," said Triathlete Myles Alexander, according to the Tribune. Alexander fell ill after eating fish soup.
According to the Tribune, Commissioner Choucair said people are excited to see the government taking necessary steps to protect citizens.
"We are always looking for new opportunities to leverage innovations to improve food safety," he said, "but we need the help from Chicagoans."
