Affiliation:
1. NLP for Social Good Lab, School of Digital Sciences, Kerala University of Digital Sciences, Innovation, and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram, India
Abstract
The World Health Organization (WHO) officially designated Mpox (Monkeypox) as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on July 23, 2022. Since early May 2022, numerous endemic countries have been reporting the spread of Mpox, with alarming mortality rates have accompanied. This situation has prompted extensive discussions and deliberations among the general public through various social media platforms and health forums.This study proposes a natural language processing approach, specifically employing topic modeling techniques, to extract and analyze the public sentiments and perspectives regarding the escalating Mpox cases on a global scale. The results revealed several themes related to Mpox transmission, such as Mpox symptoms, international travel, government interventions, and homophobia from the user-generated content. The results further confirm that the general public has many stigmas and fears about the Mpox virus, which is prevalent in almost all topics.