Attention to sex and gender in biomedical, health and clinical research is an important quality and safety issue. Medicinal products are safer and more effective for everyone when clinical research includes diverse population groups. Historically, women’s health issues have focused on reproductive health, followed by gender issues such as behaviour, socio-economic factors, culture, lifestyles and influence biological development and health.
Human rights are at the very core of EU democracy. With the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU became legally binding and the EU acceded to the European Convention on Human Rights.
In the wake of the 2009-2010 H1N1-pandemic, also known as the swine flu, a web of mistrust between the public and health authorities was spun. National pandemic plans were usually based on a single scenario that was more severe than the actual 2009 pandemic, and that was extrapolated from the severity of previous outbreaks like SARS and Avian flu. In effect the 2009 pandemic was nicknamed the false-pandemic or ‘the pandemic there never was’. However, national health authorities had declared a pandemic and bought vaccines for billions.
The exploration and adoption of best practices in health by public institutions and non-governmental organizations as well has been growing in recent years. ASSET experts recognize the importance of these activities. Thus, they will gather examples from all around Europe and present them on a dedicated page.
But what exactly are “best practices”, and what are the differences between best and good practices?
Influenza pandemics are unpredictable but recurring events that can have severe consequences on human health and socio-economic life to global level. For this reason, the World Health Organization (WHO) has recommended all countries to prepare a pandemic influenza plan following its own guidelines.
One day, eight countries, fifty participants for each of them, open discussions and a series of questions. These are the ingredients of the citizen consultations organized by ASSET on September 24th, to voice people’s opinion on epidemic preparedness and response.
Vaccines have had broad medical impact, but existing vaccine technologies and production methods are limited in their ability to respond to certain pathogens. Other hurdles are due to difficulties in large scale production. MycoSynVac project proposes a new way for developing vaccines, by using of cutting-edge synthetic biology methodologies to engineer Mycoplasma pneumoniae as a universal chassis for vaccination.
Parents, healthcare workers, bloggers and science communicators have launched a positive experience in Italy, with the aim of sharing and promoting scientific information towards an important public health goal: to face the drop in vaccine coverage.
In recent years – mainly thanks to the communicative dynamics of the web – drawings, graphs and visualizations have become a powerful way to spread news and information. Social networks are overflowed by memes and animated gifs, and several journals, both digital and paper, make use of infographic to depict concepts and information revealed by large amount of data.
