NIH Spends Almost $200,000 on Studying E-Cigarette Tweets

The National Institutes of Health hosts a project that spends $199,665 on analyzing tweets about e-cigarettes, according to The Washington Free Beacon.

The project is called "Toward Fine-Grained E-Cigarette Surveillance on Social Media."

The NIH's grant report said that since e-cigarettes have been reported to be harmful, analyzing the social media discussion about them for one year will provide vital information.

"For an emerging product like e-cigarettes, the asymmetric follower-friend connections and hashtag functionality in Twitter offer a convenient way to propagate information and facilitate discussion," the grant report said.

The project began Aug. 10 at the University of Kentucky. Researchers said in the grant report that they will look at all tweets about e-cigarettes that were sent between July 2016 and June 2017.

The grant report said the results would help health agencies, the Food and Drug Administration, and researchers to create ways to reach e-cigarette users to inform them about health risks.

The FDA also is taking aim at the risks of using e-cigarettes. The agency announced on Aug. 8 that it would launch a campaign aimed to discourage people from using e-cigarettes.

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