Members of the ECOM project will gather for a final symposium on November 10th 2015 in Stockholm, prior to the European Scientific Conference on Applied Infectious Disease Epidemiology (ESCAIDE). ECOM – which stands for Effective Communication in Outbreak Management – is an EU funded project that aims to develop strategies for improving risk-communication during major pandemic outbreaks in Europe.
The 2015 ESCAIDE conference will take place on 11-13 November 2015. It will be hosted at the Stockholm Waterfront Congress Centre, in the heart of the city. The ESCAIDE programme will offer a huge range of exciting presentations, posters, seminars and workshops on all aspects of infectious disease prevention and control.
The alarming drop of vaccine coverage in Italy reported by the Istituto superiore di sanità and the rising scepticism towards the efficacy and safety of vaccinations is not due to parents being less informed than ten years ago. On the contrary, nowadays the resolution to take mindful health choices for their own children is a stronger drive for families to gather information. A drive that does not represent a lack of attention or a weaker desire to protect their kids.
Italy is facing a serious drop in vaccine coverage, which are falling close to – and in some cases even below – the target set by the Minister of Health in the current national plan for vaccine prevention. This is a serious problem for public health, since, for infections transmitted from man to man (tetanus being an exception), a high coverage is necessary to protect those people that cannot be vaccinated either because of their age or because of clinical reasons, such as for cancer therapies, through the mechanism of herd immunity.
On September 17, 2015, the NEN (Netherlands Standardization Institute) will host the workshop ‘Ethical Impact Assessment for Research and Innovation’. The Workshop is organized by the SATORI project and will assess the feasibility of European consensus for such a framework.
The monographic issue of Vaccine, published in August 2015 under the title “WHO Recommendations Regarding Vaccine Hesitancy”, is a collection of materials produced by a group specifically dedicated to the topic in 2012, under the combined leadership of the WHO and UNICEF.
Infectious diseases not only impact on people’s health conditions, but also on several socio-economic aspects. Facing epidemics and pandemics is thus a major challenge for both science and society, a challenge that requires a multidisciplinary approach. Within this context, the first ASSET Summer School will be held in Rome, on September 21-24, at the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS).
Increasingly, public health organisations and the public are grappling with how to filter out myth and misinformation online to find trustworthy, evidence-based health information.
Experts, skills and quick responses
Recent experiences during H1N1, Ebola and measles outbreaks have seen public health organisations begin to change their approach to providing health information online. Governments and public health organisations have begun to use three broad categories of online response:
