Text mining to identify the origin of chronic wasting disease

Authors

G. WebbFollow

Publication Date

January 2021

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Issues in Information Systems

Volume

22

Issue

3

DOI

DOI: https://doi.org/10.48009/3_iis_2021_200-213

First Page

184

Last Page

196

Abstract

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a 100 percent fatal, prion disease of deer that has the potential to decimate the deer population and jump to the human population. A simple Google search on the “origin of chronic wasting disease” yielded a total of 56 relevant articles. Of these, 75 percent report that the origin is unknown, 19.6 percent report that the disease may have originated in a Fort Collins, Colorado, government research facility, and 5.4 percent report other possible origins. Government sources reported the Fort Collins theory 4.3 percent of the time while non-governmental sources, such as news articles, reported the Fort Collins theory 32.1 percent of the time. Text mining of the internet for the first 40 years of the disease produced evidence supporting a common assertion in the press that all of the early cases can be traced back to Fort Collins. For 1967 into 1998, six clusters were identified that could all be traced back to Fort Collins. Limited information from game farms made tracking difficult for 1998 to 2007 with 10 more clusters traced back to areas linked to Fort Collins or with trace backs to Fort Collins explainable based originsof on the evidence. Available at: www.deerfriendly.com/deer-disease/chronic-wastingdisease/possiblechronicwastingdisease

Keywords

Text Mining, Contact Tracing, Analytics/Business Intelligence

Comments

Copyright is owned by author

Recommended Citation

G. Webb. "Text mining to identify the origin of chronic wasting disease" Issues in Information Systems (2021): 184-196. https://doi.org/DOI: https://doi.org/10.48009/3_iis_2021_200-213