Online Awareness Of Antibiotic Resistance : A Sentiment Analysis On Twitter

Sammanfattning: Antibiotic resistance is a global threat to our modern healthcare. Since the introduction of antibiotics, healthcare professionals have been able to cure bacterial infections and therefore also perform complex surgeries. If multi-resistant bacteria would become widespread, it could mean antibiotic treatments are becoming obsolete. There are some theories suggesting the use of an antibiotic drug are correlating with resistance to that drug. Hence, end user awareness of antibiotic resistance is important in order to avoid unnecessary usage and inappropriate consumption. Voices have been raised the gravity of this issue is not understood to a satisfactory extent among the world population. Measuring how people perceive antibiotics is therefore an important step to create further basis to combat antibiotic resistance. Current data about resistance is to a high extent limited to prescription rates and similar indicators. This is not sufficient to comprehend attitudes towards consumption. In order to better understand the public's perception of antibiotic resistance and antibiotic efficacy on viruses, tweets from Twitter were collected containing the word 'antibiotics' for thirty-one days between January the 24th and February the 24th 2020. A sentiment analysis were conducted on all collected tweets matching specific criteria, in total 11975 tweets. The results are aggregated into summaries for the whole data set and for subsets containing words like 'resistance', 'virus' or 'Covid19'. Measurement was also performed on how many of the collected tweets that contain those keywords. The study implies English speaking users, in general, to discuss antibiotic resistance to a low degree. In addition, users seem to generally speak about antibiotics in a positive way.  As one of the first big-data studies targeting antibiotic resistance on social media, the results suggest the hypothesis about low end user awareness is correct. However, further research has to be conducted to validate the results and understand why people don't discuss antibiotic resistance to a higher degree.