Nothing is worse than that sinking feeling, a few hours after eating, that the questionable seafood choice you made at a local restaurant or watering hole is likely coming back to haunt you.
But how could you have known? Everyone seems to know someone who got food poisoning from somewhere — well, in my food writer circle, at least — but mostly, these tales spread through word of mouth. It’s only if a situation reaches a truly widespread level would there be official notification of such things.
Now, researchers in New York are urging health officials to consider the possibility that review sites such as Yelp could help people avoid some of that pain and food poisoning suffering.
A study conducted by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and Columbia University with Yelp’s cooperation helped identify three restaurant related outbreaks of food poisoning that had gone unreported.
Researchers came up with the idea while investigating a particular outbreak, according to the findings released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday.
Click here to read the full summary of the report.
The health department noted that patrons had reported illnesses on Yelp that had not been reported to the department. The researchers subsequently designed a software program to analyze nearly 300,000 Yelp restaurant reviews in New York City for nine months in 2012 and 2013.
For cases reported on Yelp that warranted further investigation, only 3 percent had also been reported to the city’s health department, the report found.
It also noted, however, that using software to analyze Yelp reviews — and then following up with manual reviews — can be costly and time consuming. Want the short version? It might not hurt to scan Yelp reviews to see if there’s a particularly high instance of people reporting being sick.
Or, you could always use WUSA9’s handy “ Restaurant Alert” tool, where reporter Russ Ptacek is on the case of restaurant inspection violations — although there’s no telling in those cases if the violations have actually made anyone sick.
