Digital Mis/Disinformation and Public Engagment with Health and Science Controversies: Fresh Perspectives from Covid-19

Digital media, while opening a vast array of avenues for lay people to effectively engage with news, information and debates about important science and health issues, have become a fertile land for various stakeholders to spread misinformation and disinformation, stimulate uncivil discussions and engender ill-informed, dangerous public decisions. Recent developments of the Covid-19 infodemic might just be the tipping point of a process that has been long simmering in controversial areas of health and science (e.g., climate-change denial, anti-vaccination, anti-5G, Flat Earth doctrines). We bring together a wide range of fresh data and perspectives from four continents to help media scholars, journalists, science communicators, scientists, health professionals and policy-makers to better undersand these developments and what can be done to mitigate their impacts on public engagement with health and science controversies.

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13.D. Workshop: SDGs in the focus of environmental and health issues

European Journal of Public Health ◽

10.1093/eurpub/ckaa165.648 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽

Author(s):

◽

Keyword(s):

Public Health ◽

Climate Change ◽

Sustainable Development ◽

Community Engagement ◽

Health Professionals ◽

Health Issues ◽

The Sustainable Development ◽

The World ◽

Environmental And Health Issues ◽

The Impact

Abstract This workshop is dedicated on SDGs in the focus of environmental and health issues, as very important and actual topic. One of the characteristics of today's societies is the significant availability of modern technologies. Over 5 billion (about 67%) people have a cellphone today. More than 4.5 billion people worldwide use the Internet, close to 60% of the total population. At the same time, one third of the people in the world does not have access to safe drinking water and half of the population does not have access to safe sanitation. The WHO at UN warns of severe inequalities in access to water and hygiene. Air, essential to life, is a leading risk due to ubiquitous pollution and contributes to the global disease burden (7 million deaths per year). Air pollution is a consequence of traffic and industry, but also of demographic trends and other human activities. Food availability reflects global inequality, famine eradication being one of the SDGs. The WHO warns of the urgency. As technology progresses, social inequality grows, the gap widens, and the environment continues to suffer. Furthermore, the social environment in societies is “ruffled” and does not appear to be beneficial toward well-being. New inequalities are emerging in the availability of technology, climate change, education. The achievement reports on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also point out to the need of reviewing individual indicators. According to the Sustainable Development Agenda, one of the goals is to reduce inequalities, and environmental health is faced by several specific goals. The Global Burden of Disease is the most comprehensive effort to date to measure epidemiological levels and trends worldwide. It is the product of a global research collaborative and quantifies the impact of hundreds of diseases, injuries, and risk factors in countries around the world. This workshop will also discuss Urban Health as a Complex System in the light of SDGs. Climate Change, Public Health impacts and the role of the new digital technologies is also important topic which is contributing to SDG3, improving health, to SDG4, allowing to provide distance health education at relatively low cost and to SDG 13, by reducing the CO2 footprint. Community Engagement can both empower vulnerable populations (so reducing inequalities) and identify the prior environmental issues to be addressed. The aim was to search for public health programs using Community Engagement tools in healthy environment building towards achievement of SDGs. Key messages Health professionals are involved in the overall process of transformation necessary to achieve the SDGs. Health professionals should be proactive and contribute to the transformation leading to better health for the environment, and thus for the human population.

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Measuring Urban Resilience to Climate Change in Three Chinese Cities

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su12229735 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 12 (22) ◽

pp. 9735

Author(s):

Mingshun Zhang ◽

Yaguang Yang ◽

Huanhuan Li ◽

Meine Pieter van Dijk

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Urban China ◽

Decision Makers ◽

Research Needs ◽

Urban Resilience ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Wide Range ◽

Resilience Index ◽

Weak Points ◽

Monitoring Progress

Building an urban resilience index results in developing an increasingly popular tool for monitoring progress towards climate-proof cities. This paper develops an urban resilience index in the context of urban China, which helps planners and policy-makers at city level to identify whether urban development is leading to more resilience. The urban resilience index (URI) suggested in this research uses data on 24 indicators distributed over six URI component indices. While no measure of such a complex phenomenon can be perfect, the URI proved to be effective, useful and robust. Our findings show that the URI ensures access to integrated information on urban resilience to climate change. It allows comparisons of cities in a systematic and quantitative way, and enables identification of strong and weak points related to urban resilience. The URI provides tangible measures of not only overall measures of urban resilience to climate change, but also urban resilience components and related indicators. Therefore, it could meet a wide range of policy and research needs. URI is a helpful tool for urban decision-makers and urban planners to quantify goals, measure progress, benchmark performance, and identify priorities for achieving high urban resilience to climate change.

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Unpacking the Levels of Household and Individual Climate Change Adaptation: Empirical Evidence from Leeds, United Kingdom

Weather Climate and Society ◽

10.1175/wcas-d-19-0109.1 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 12 (3) ◽

pp. 501-513 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Chukwuma Otum Ume ◽

Ogochukwu Onah ◽

Kehinde Paul Adeosun ◽

Onyekwe Chris Nnamdi ◽

Nice Nneoma Ihedioha ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

United Kingdom ◽

Climate Change Adaptation ◽

Public Awareness ◽

Government Support ◽

Quantitative Aspect ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Climate Change Research ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

Wide Range

AbstractThis study set out to empirically determine the current state of individual and household adaptation to climate change in the United Kingdom and how policy makers can improve on it. The study utilized both qualitative and quantitative approaches (mixed method). For the quantitative aspect of the study, a quota-sampling technique was employed in the selection of 650 respondents for the study using a well-structured questionnaire. The quota representation was based on age and gender. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and binary logit regression. In addition, qualitative content/topic analysis of an in-depth interview of the respondents was employed in further analyzing why and how policy makers can improve climate change adaptation. Findings from the study indicate the dire need for continued government support in household and individual adaptation in Leeds, and this support should also be encouraged in other cities where government intervention is low. Interventions in the form of subsidies, direct regulations, and public awareness are needed. The implementation of these measures is expected to generate a wide range of additional benefits to most vulnerable groups who should be central to the rapidly expanding climate change research and policy agenda in the United Kingdom.

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COVID-19 vaccine online misinformation in Fiji: Preliminary findings

Pacific Journalism Review – Te Koakoa ◽

10.24135/pjr.v27i1and2.1189 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 27 (1and2) ◽

pp. 47-62

Author(s):

Romitesh Kant ◽

Rufino Varea ◽

Jason Titifanue

Keyword(s):

Digital Media ◽

Vaccine Hesitancy ◽

Health Issues ◽

Health Crisis ◽

Conspiracy Theories ◽

Vast Array ◽

Fertile Ground ◽

Health Related ◽

Research Findings ◽

Preliminary Research

Digital media, opens a vast array of avenues for lay people to effectively engage with news, information and debates about important science and health issues. However, they have also become a fertile ground for various stakeholders to spread misinformation and disinformation, stimulate uncivil discussions and engender ill-informed, dangerous public decisions. During the COVID-19 pandemic, antivaccination social media accounts are proliferating online, threatening to further escalate vaccine hesitancy. The pandemic signifies not only a global health crisis, it has also proven to be an infodemic characterised by many conspiracy theories. Prior research indicates that belief in health-related conspiracies can harm efforts to curtail the spread of a virus. This article presents and examines preliminary research findings on COVID-19 vaccine related misinformation being circulated on Fijian Facebook Forums.

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Climate change vulnerability for species – assessing the assessments

10.1101/062646 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Christopher J. Wheatley ◽

Colin M. Beale ◽

Richard B. Bradbury ◽

James W. Pearce-Higgins ◽

Rob Critchlow ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Historical Data ◽

Global Climate ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Climate Change Vulnerability ◽

Vulnerability Assessments ◽

Wide Range ◽

Trend Data ◽

Historic Data ◽

Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment

AbstractClimate change vulnerability assessments are commonly used to identify species at risk from global climate change, but the wide range of methodologies available makes it difficult for end users, such as conservation practitioners or policy makers, to decide which method to use as a basis for decision-making. Here, we compare the outputs of 12 such climate change vulnerability assessment methodologies, using both real and simulated species, and we test the methods using historic data for British birds and butterflies (i.e., using historical data to assign risks, and more recent data for validation). Our results highlight considerable inconsistencies in species risk assignment across all the approaches considered and suggest the majority of the frameworks are poor predictors of risk under climate change – two methods performed worse than random. Methods that incorporated historic trend data were the only ones to have any validity at predicting distributional trends in subsequent time periods.

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What Makes Some Diseases More Typical than Others? A Survey on the Impact of Disease Characteristics and Professional Background on Disease Typicality

INQUIRY The Journal of Health Care Organization Provision and Financing ◽

10.1177/0046958020972813 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 57 ◽

pp. 004695802097281

Author(s):

Tore Hofstad ◽

James A. Hampton ◽

Bjørn Hofmann

Keyword(s):

Health Professionals ◽

General Study ◽

Professional Background ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Disease Characteristics ◽

Wide Range ◽

Positive Correlations ◽

Occupational Background ◽

The Impact ◽

Behavioral Conditions

Health professionals tend to perceive some diseases as more typical than others. If disease typicalities have implications for health professionals or health policy makers’ handling of different diseases, then it is of great social, epistemic, and ethical interest. Accordingly, it is important to find out what makes health professionals rank diseases as more or less typical. This study investigates the impact of various factors on how typical various diseases are perceived to be by health professionals. In particular, we study the influence of broad disease categories, such as somatic versus psychological/behavioral conditions, and a wide range of more specific disease characteristics, as well as the health professional’s own background. We find that professional background strongly impacted disease typicality. All professionals (MD, RN, physiotherapists and psychologists) considered somatic conditions to be more typical than psychological/behavioral. As expected, psychologists also found psychological/behavioral conditions to be more typical than did other groups. Professions of respondents could be well predicted from their individual typicality judgments, with the exception of physiotherapists and nurses who had very similar judgment profiles. We also demonstrate how various disease characteristics impact typicality for the different professionals. Typicality showed moderate to strong positive correlations with condition severity and mortality, and only non-severe conditions were rated as atypical. Hence, studying how different disease characteristics and occupational background influences health professionals’ perception of disease typicality is the first and important step toward a more general study of how typicality influences disease handling.

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Diversity and Training in Performing Arts Medicine

Medical Problems of Performing Artists ◽

10.21091/mppa.2019.2020 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 34 (2) ◽

pp. 122-123

Author(s):

Bronwen J Ackermann

Keyword(s):

Performing Arts ◽

Health Issues ◽

Medical Problems ◽

High Quality Research ◽

Performing Arts Medicine ◽

Performing Artists ◽

Vast Array ◽

Wide Range ◽

Health Demands ◽

Multiple Health

Medical Problems of Performing Artists has addressed the needs of clinicians for many decades, providing evidence and opinion pieces on performing artists' healthcare regarding a wide range of health issues that may either affect or cause problems when performing. Traditionally, two major challenges facing the best approaches to managing the health of performing artists has been (i) limited scientific research evidence supporting preventative approaches, specific assessments and treatment methods for the vast array of conditions seen, and (ii) a lack of training programs specifically targeting performing artists' healthcare. Not only are there many important differences between general healthcare and managing the health of performing artists, but there are variations between individuals performing on the same instrument, and a vast array of styles and genres of performing arts that create very different demands on performers. In relation to the first point, a previous lack of available scientific literature has hindered evidence-informed performing arts medicine practice; however, high-quality research has recently progressed rapidly. This edition of MPPA also highlights the incredible breadth of information emerging, recognising the complex and multiple health demands facing diverse performing arts domains.

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Climate change and health: time for action!

European Journal of Public Health ◽

10.1093/eurpub/ckaa166.144 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽

Author(s):

L Marrauld ◽

M Cucchi ◽

E Lainey ◽

A Depoux

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Air Pollution ◽

Greenhouse Gas ◽

Health Professionals ◽

Large Scale ◽

Developed Countries ◽

Human Populations ◽

Health Issues ◽

Tackle Climate Change ◽

Climate Change And Health

Abstract Issue For several weeks, prophylactic messages against the extension of Covid-19 have saturated the public space. To protect populations, efficient measures have been rapidly put to limit the movement of people and manufactured goods. These policies have reduced global greenhouse gas emissions as well as air pollution, especially in China. Problem If climate change were an epidemic, we would probably have already restored it. But it results directly from the thermo-industrial activities linked to the consumption society. For Friel (Lancet, 2020), the dramatic consequences of this disturbances have to be considered as an essential health issue. She advocates for 'climate change and health alliances'. Results Within such alliances, health professionals have the responsibility (1) to describe the morbidity inherent in our thermo-industrial societies (2) to alert populations, and (3) to work with allies to tackle climate change and protect human populations, starting with the most vulnerable. This type of alliance is underway in the battle against air pollution, as it has been for years for fighting smoking. Alliances are intended to extend to all population health issues, with a complete decompartmentalization of minds and practices at large scale. Lessons Health professionals have to be mindful not to cause any harm while practicing. The health system alone produces up to 8% of global greenhouse gas in developed countries (Pichler, 2019; HCWH, 2019). There is room for action. Since 2009, the British health care system (NHS) has adopted an efficient decarbonation policy, reducing global emission from 8 to 4%, but this outstanding initiative remains an exception worldwide. Key messages A review of public health strategies is necessary to meet the energy, environmental and health issues, both in terms of health risks due to climate change and of decarbonation of care activities. Health professionals have the responsibility to alert populations and to work with allies to tackle climate change and protect human populations.

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A New World Post COVID-19

10.30687/978-88-6969-442-4 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Monica Billio ◽

Simone Varotto

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Artificial Intelligence ◽

Monetary Policy ◽

Big Data ◽

Financial Markets ◽

New World ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Wide Range ◽

Change Labour Market ◽

Fiscal And Monetary Policy

Pandemics are disruptive events that have profound consequences for society and the economy. This volume aims to present an analysis of the economic impact of COVID-19 and its likely consequences for our future. This is achieved by drawing from the expertise of authors who specialise in a wide range of fields including fiscal and monetary policy, banking, financial markets, pensions and insurance, artificial intelligence and big data, climate change, labour market, travel, tourism and politics, among others. We asked contributing authors to write their chapters for a non-technical audience so that their message could reach beyond academia and professional economists to policy makers and the wider society. The material in this volume draws from the latest research and provides a wealth of ideas for further investigations and opportunities for reflection. This also makes it an ideal learning tool for economics and finance students wishing to gain a deeper understanding of how COVID-19 could influence their disciplines.

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Talking EPC - speech pathologists' views of the Enhanced Primary Care items four years on

Australian Health Review ◽

10.1071/ah09737 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 34 (1) ◽

pp. 25 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Jemma Skeat ◽

Angela Morgan ◽

Tristan Nickless

Keyword(s):

Primary Care ◽

General Practitioners ◽

Health Professionals ◽

Allied Health ◽

Allied Health Professionals ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Starting Point ◽

Wide Range ◽

Speech Pathologists ◽

Effective Use

Background.Allied health professionals have provided services under Enhanced Primary Care (EPC) since 2004; however, the experiences and views of AHPs about the initiative and how it has been utilised have not been well explored. Objective.We examined speech pathologists’ views and experiences under EPC. Methods.A survey of speech pathologists in private practice who provide services under EPC was undertaken. Results.Speech pathologists provide EPC services to a wide range of clients with communication and swallowing disorders. The five EPC sessions provide a ‘starting point’ for therapy for some clients, and supplement existing therapy for others. Speech pathologists expressed concern about the accessibility of the program, and its understanding and use in practice, but noted that the program can be valuable for clients who are able to negotiate the hurdles, and for themselves in terms of increased referrals and collaboration with general practitioners. Conclusions.Education around eligibility, access, and reporting requirements is needed for clients, GPs and allied health professionals in order to reduce the frustrating aspects of this program, and support its ongoing use. What is known about the topic?The Enhanced Primary Care (EPC) program relies on collaboration between general practitioners and allied health professionals, and aims to improve the management of chronic and complex conditions in the community. The experiences and views of allied health professionals (AHPs) in implementing the EPC program since 2004 are important to inform evaluation of the effectiveness, usefulness and value of the program. What does this paper add?We explored speech pathologists’ perspectives on EPC, including their experiences and views about the program. The paper informs understanding of the use of EPC in practice, for example, how sessions are provided to clients over the 12-month period, as well as how those who use it – allied health professionals – perceive the value and practicality of this program. What are the implications for practitioners?Education for GPs, clients and AHPs is needed to facilitate a more efficient and effective use of EPC. Policy makers should consider the views and experiences of AHPs when reviewing the EPC initiative, in order to understand aspects such as the accessibility of the programs for clients, and the perceived value for AHPs.

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