Women who are pregnant are more likely to have severe disease and hospitalisation with either seasonal or pandemic influenza, compared to the general population or compared to non-pregnant women of the same age group. During pandemics, the mortality rate for pregnant women is higher than non-pregnant women. However, this is not the case with seasonal influenza unless the strain is particularly severe (WHO 2010).
EUPATI, European Patients’ Academy on Therapeutic Innovation, is a patient-led initiative that uses training courses, educational material and an online public library for empowering patients to engage more effectively in the development and approval of new treatments and become true partners in pharmaceutical research and development. Filippo Buccella, chairman of the Italian Liaison Team explains to ASSET how this initiative can involve healthy citizens as well, improving preparedness to infectious outbreaks and other crises.
The internet and social media era is both a great and a hard time to be an empowered patient or citizen. Every day everyone is overwhelmed by information, but also by misinformation. Discerning between the two is not so easy, according to Dennis Costello, Web Communications Senior Manager & RareConnect Leader at EURORDIS (Rare Diseases Europe). Best practices should be adopted by creators of contents and technical tools can further help in selecting them, but patients’ and consumers’ associations have a leading role in this, guiding the public so that they can make better decisions for themselves and their family.
Social media, mobile technology and social networks constitute an extremely rich and dynamic information ecosystem. With a world population of more than seven billion people, almost half of them have an internet connection, while the active social media users are about 2.8 billion. Huge numbers, which clearly shows how deep these instruments are rooted into our society. It is not a surprise, then, that social media are also increasingly present in disaster and crisis response efforts. Their growing presence in these scenarios represent an issue, but also an opportunity.
As a part of the ASSET project, the European Institute of Women’s Health were tasked with liaising with local schools to disseminate the activities of the ASSET project. The schools were to have received funding under the Erasmus Plus programme, which is the programme that combines all the EU’s current schemes for education, training, youth and sport in Europe.
Some things just do not want to die. In public health, anti-vaccination movements keep sizzling debates, just as they did in the XIX century. At the same time, the “deficit model” of science communication – the myth that the “public” is just ignorant and that it would support science, if spoon-fed information from the ivory tower – still haunts the relationship between health, science and the community, despite having been repeatedly debunked. The two zombies are more related than one could believe. Vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccination movements grow in the cracks between trust and knowledge, and these are the fault lines that communication should heal – or rip apart, if it fails.
Abraham T. Eur J Public Health. 2013 Oct 1;23(1).
Post SARS, the WHO and other organizations charged with public health in different parts of the world began to focus on the task of refining emergency risk communication strategies and principles. Based on the experience of communication during SARS, as well as earlier infectious diseases such as Nipah and Ebola, the WHO identified five critical best practices for effective outbreak communication.
During the period between October and December 2016, we used our algorithm to find out the most relevant Twitter influencers about vaccines. We performed a multilevel study to categorize the accounts and to identify the most relevant hashtags.
We analysed 869 accounts and categorized 373 of them:
