  For a long time, public health events, such as disease incidence or
vaccination activity, have been monitored to keep track of the health status of
the population, allowing to evaluate the effect of public health initiatives
and to decide where resources for improving public health are best spent. This
thesis investigates the use of web data mining for public health monitoring,
and makes contributions in the following two areas: New approaches for
predicting public health events from web mined data, and novel applications of
web mined data for public health monitoring.
