New York City authorities will read Yelp restaurant reviews to uncover causes of food poisoning. Three unreported outbreaks were found through analysis of 300,000 reviews on the popular website. The outbreaks were related to 16 illnesses.

An expert said the mode to uncover cases of food poisoning is an innovative way to identify clusters of food poisoning. Mike Doyle, head of the University of Georgia's food safety center, said the idea is really great as many people find it difficult to get in touch with the health departments about the problems they faced after eating in certain restaurants, but being able to share their woes with social media helps other diners to heed to their warnings about food-borne illnesses.

The effort is the latest for using the internet to track illnesses. Outbreaks were traced in three restaurants in New York and inspectors blamed those on problems with food handling in all the three restaurants. Officials also identified the contaminated food that caused those outbreaks, but failed to figure out the exact germ in the food that made people sick.

About 3,000 people in New York report their complaints of potential food poisonings to the city's 311 service hotline each year. But only 1% of those complaints lead to a cluster of illnesses.

The health department conceived the idea of using Yelp to help identify unreported outbreaks of food-borne illness after seeing talk that helped with a month-long restaurant investigation in 2011.

"With food-borne illnesses, it's much better to reach people sooner. When investigating an outbreak, we want to know what people who got sick ate, who else was with them and what items they all ate together. If you wait, people forget", said Dr. Sharon Balter, a medical epidemiologist with the city's health department.