Global discussion of disease outbreaks may indicate where an outbreak will spread. This is the first study to examine how these discussions, via social media, can be used to understand and predict geographic spread of disease. Both the models demonstrated good fit to expected distributions through the HL test and correctly predicted no outbreak in Puerto Rico. We are working on incorporating data from more countries into the model, as well as other covariates such as environmental factors that would contribute to a country's tendency toward an outbreak. Although the global microblogging community is currently limited in demographics, penetrat\ion of consumer technology is increasing worldwide and could be a useful complementary tool for timely and cost-effective disease outbreak surveillance. 