Dionna Taylor will be in San Antonio this coming week to present at the APHA 2026 Annual Meeting and Expo between November 1–4. We believe this is the first time anybody from the collective has been to APHA, so please stop by and say hi or reach out to Dionna!
Sunday, November 1, 1:00–2:00 pm (Henry B. González Convention Center, Row 12 – Board 6, Student Poster Competitions I)
Dionna will present "Determinants of online health discussions: A disease burden perspective" as part of the Applied Public Health Statistics student poster competition. The project asks why some health conditions get far more attention online than others. Dionna matched 183 health conditions from the Global Burden of Disease dataset to Reddit posts and measured each condition's stigma using word embeddings. The study found that the volume of discussion tracks disease burden, measured in disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), more closely than it tracks stigma or prevalence. The results suggest that combining population health metrics with computational methods can show where online attention matches public health need and where it falls short.
