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.
Citizens from the eight Countries partner of the ASSET project will gather on September 24th to discuss and express themselves through a public consultation on some of the key topics of the project:
An application aimed to help parents taking care of their children’s health. This is the idea behind MyPed, a mobile app developed by a group of physicians that won our Best practice award for general practitioners. The app, available for both Android and iOS smartphone, combines different tools that parents may use to manage their children’s health.
Flutrackers is an online platform that gather information about infectious diseases from journals, news sources and citizens around the world. It was started in 2006 by a diverse group of volunteers, initially interested in investigating seasonal influenza, novel influenza, and chikungunya. In later years, we expanded our range by including other health threats such as the Ebola and Zika viruses, and drug resistant bacteria.
Institutions, public agencies and authorities can tackle different kinds of crisis by using social media. In the last few months, this has been done successfully in very diverse cases, both defending the reputation of a big oil company from a journalistic inquiry, and managing the response to a terror attack within a city. Even if the type and range of crisis is hugely different, the efficacy of a prompt and wise use of social network gives clues that could be useful when dealing with infectious threats as well.
The consideration of sex and gender are not the most obvious issues that come to mind when discussing epidemics and pandemics. However, sex and gender have an important impact on these issues, since barriers to pandemic preparedness and risk behaviour can often be better understood when viewed from a sex and gender perspective.
Both gender and sex have an impact on experiences and behaviours relating to pandemics, epidemics and vaccination. The difference between sex and gender can be confusing, and the two words are often incorrectly used interchangeably.
A MMLAP (Mobilization and Mutual Learning Action Plan) Area has been activated within the Community of Practice of the ASSET website: this area is planned to stimulate the debate between the ASSET consortium and other MMLAP projects on the Best practices to develop and implement the communication between science and society.
Science is getting out of laboratories and reaching the general public. That is, we are moving from the only goal of bringing Science-in-society, adding that of bringing Society-in-science: for years researchers have been blamed for living in their ivory towers, and asked to learn how to talk to common people, explaining their work and influencing policies and behaviours; now common people are stepping into science, giving their own support to a common cause.
On June 3rd, the European Commission rejected the Stop Vivisection Initiative, which asked to abrogate Directive 2010/63/EU1 on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes and to put forward a new proposal aimed at phasing out the practice of animal experimentation, making compulsory the use - in biomedical and toxicological research - of data directly relevant for the human species.
The report published in March 2015 by Medecins sans frontières speaks out clearly against the “global coalition of inaction” and the “vacuum of leadership” in the Ebola crisis in West Africa. Those who were struggling in the field against a huge and out-of-control emergency, without the necessary resources, list the main causes of such a situation: lack of political will, inexperience, and, sometimes, simply fear.