Trust in Medicine as a Factor Conditioning Behaviors Recommended by Healthcare Experts during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Poland

Objective: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, public health experts have faced the challenge of convincing people to change their everyday habits. This study aims to evaluate the impact of trust in medicine on Polish citizens’ adherence to recommended behaviors. Methods: An online survey was conducted on a quota sample of adult Poles (n = 1072) during the second wave of COVID-19. Results: The trust-in-medicine index was created from statements relating to trust in healthcare professionals, vaccines, and medicines. This index showed that 27.1% of respondents expressed low trust, 36.7% expressed moderate trust, and 36.3% expressed high trust. The recommended behavior index was created from nine statements. This index showed that 15.8% of respondents had low adherence, 38.2% had moderate adherence, and 46.0% had high adherence to the healthcare experts’ recommendations. One-way analysis of variance showed that people with a high trust had significantly higher scores on the recommended behavior index when compared to people with a moderate or low trust. Conclusions: This study suggests that those responsible for health policy should put more effort into building trust not only in health professionals, but also in pharmaceutical companies. We also determined the socio-demographic features of people to whom such actions of trust building should be directed.

Depression and Suicide Analysis Using Machine Learning and NLP

Depression is a common type of mental illness that can impair performance and lead to suicide ideation or attempts. Traditional techniques used by mental health experts can assist in determining an individual’s type of depression. Machine learning and NLP were used to understand how to predict posts that indicate depression in people and their accuracy. For this work, we have used a dataset from reddit. Reddit is an ideal destination to use as a supplement to the traditional public health system because of its punctuality in exchanging ideas, versatility in presenting emotions, as well as compatibility to use medical terms. We examined the comments and posts about suicidal ideation. We used NLP to gain a better understanding of interdisciplinary fields which are related to suicide. We discovered two help groups for depression and suicidal thoughts: r/depression and r/SuicideWatch. The famous “SuicideWatch” subreddit is commonly used by people who have thoughts of suicide and gives significant signals for suicidal behavior. A brief scan through the articles discloses that the subreddits are legitimate online spots to seek assistance and provide honest text data about people’s mental state. We have used multiple ML algorithms such as Naïve Bayes, SVM. To address the research problem, we have considered two subreddits that provided us with appropriate information to track people at risk. We achieved results of 77.29 % accuracy and 0.77 f1-score of Logistic Regression, 74.35 % accuracy and 0.74 f1-score of Naïve Bayes, 77.120% accuracy and 0.77 f1-score of Support Vector Machine, 77.298% accuracy, and 0.77 f1-score of Random Forest.

Adherence to Social-Distancing and Personal Hygiene Behavior Guidelines and Risk of COVID-19 Diagnosis: Evidence From the Understanding America Study

Objectives. To assess the association between individual-level adherence to social-distancing and personal hygiene behaviors recommended by public health experts and subsequent risk of COVID-19 diagnosis in the United States. Methods. Data are from waves 7 through 26 (June 10, 2020–April 26, 2021) of the Understanding America Study COVID-19 survey. We used Cox models to assess the relationship between engaging in behaviors considered high risk and risk of COVID-19 diagnosis. Results. Individuals engaging in behaviors indicating lack of adherence to social-distancing guidelines, especially those related to large gatherings or public interactions, had a significantly higher risk of COVID-19 diagnosis than did those who did not engage in these behaviors. Each additional risk behavior was associated with a 9% higher risk of COVID-19 diagnosis (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.09; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.05, 1.13). Results were similar after adjustment for sociodemographic characteristics and local infection rates. Conclusions. Personal mitigation behaviors appear to influence the risk of COVID-19, even in the presence of social factors related to infection risk. Public Health Implications. Our findings emphasize the importance of individual behaviors for preventing COVID-19, which may be relevant in contexts with low vaccination. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(1):169–178. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306565 )

Two Domains to Five: Advancing Veterinary Duty of Care to Fulfil Public Expectations of Animal Welfare Expertise

Veterinarians are animal health experts. More recently, they have been conferred a leading role as experts in animal welfare. This expectation of veterinarians as welfare experts appears to stem from their training in veterinary medicine as well as professional contributions to welfare-relevant policy and law. Veterinarians are ideally situated to act as animal welfare experts by virtue of their core work with animals and potential influence over owners, their roles in policy development, compliance, and monitoring, and as educators of future veterinarians. However, since its inception as a discipline over 70 years ago, animal welfare science has moved beyond a two-dimensional focus on nutrition and health (biological functioning) towards an understanding that the mental experiences of animals are the focus of welfare consideration. The Five Domains Model is a structured and systematic framework for more holistically considering conditions that contribute to the animal’s internal state and its perception of its external situation, and the resultant mental experiences. The Model can be used to better align veterinary animal welfare expertise with contemporary understanding of animal welfare science and improve welfare literacy within the veterinary profession. Improved understanding of animal welfare science is likely to lead to increased confidence, competence, and empowerment to act as experts in their daily lives.

NFC-Blockchain Based COVID-19 Immunity Certificate: Proposed System and Emerging Issues

Vaccine requirements are becoming more mandatory in several countries as public health experts and governments become more concerned about the COVID-19 pandemic and its variants. In the meantime, as the number of vaccine requirements grows, so does the counterfeiting of vaccination documents. Fake vaccination certificates are steadily growing, being sold online and on the dark web. Due to the nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a need of robust authentication mechanisms that support touch-less technologies like Near Field Communication (NFC). Thus, in this paper, a blockchain-NFC based COVID-19 Digital Immunity Certificate (DIC) system is proposed. The vaccination data are first encrypted by the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm on Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and then uploaded to the blockchain. The proposed system is based on the amalgamation of NCF and blockchain technologies which can mitigate the issue of fake vaccination certificates. Furthermore, the emerging issues of employing the proposed system are discussed with future directions.

How a Nutritional Deficiency Became Treated with Fluoride

Ignoring evidence on causes of disease such as smoking can harm public health. This report explores how public health experts started to ignore evidence that pediatric vitamin D deficiencies are associated with dental caries. Historical analyses show that an organization of clinical specialists, the American Dental Association (ADA), initiated this view. The ADA was a world-leading organization and its governing bodies worked through political channels to make fluoride a global standard of care for a disease which at the time was viewed as an indicator of vitamin D deficiencies. The ADA scientific council was enlisted in this endeavor and authorized the statement saying that “claims for vitamin D as a factor in tooth decay are not acceptable”. This statement was ghost-written, the opposite of what the ADA scientific council had endorsed for 15 years, and the opposite of what the National Academy of Sciences concluded. Internal ADA documents are informative on the origin of this scientific conundrum; the ADA scientific council had ignored their scientific rules and was assisting ADA governing bodies in conflicts with the medical profession on advertising policies. The evidence presented here suggests that professional organizations of clinical specialists have the power to create standards of care which ignore key evidence and consequently can harm public health.

Demographic and Evolutionary Consequences of Pandemic Diseases

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has justifiably captured the attention of people around the world since late 2019. It has produced in many people a new perspective on or, indeed, a new realization about our potential vulnerability to emerging infectious diseases. However, our species has experienced numerous catastrophic disease pandemics in the past, and in addition to concerns about the harm being produced during the pandemic and the potential long-term sequelae of the disease, what has been frustrating for many public health experts, anthropologists, and historians is awareness that many of the outcomes of COVID-19 are not inevitable and might have been preventable had we actually heeded lessons from the past. We are currently witnessing variation in exposure risk, symptoms, and mortality from COVID-19, but these patterns are not surprising given what we know about past pandemics. We review here the literature on the demographic and evolutionary consequences of the Second Pandemic of Plague (ca. fourteenth–nineteenth centuries C.E.) and the 1918 influenza pandemic, two of the most devastating pandemics in recorded human history. These both provide case studies of the ways in which sociocultural and environmental contexts shape the experiences and outcomes of pandemic disease. Many of the factors at work during these past pandemics continue to be reproduced in modern contexts, and ultimately our hope is that by highlighting the outcomes that are at least theoretically preventable, we can leverage our knowledge about past experiences to prepare for and respond to disease today.

The Case of Australia

Government responses to COVID-19 have dramatically altered the social quality of daily circumstances. Consequently, theoretical questions about social cohesion require recalibration as we explore new models of social quality. Central to this article is trust, one of the fundamental tenets of social cohesion. We present data from interviews with 40 women in midlife (45–64 years) regarding their everyday experiences of “life in lockdown” during the pandemic. Key themes focus on women’s (dis)trust in individuals (e.g., politicians, public health experts, family, themselves) and systems (e.g., politics, medicine, the media). This study provides insights into the differential impact of the pandemic in shaping public trust and hence social cohesion—in authority, institutions, and “each other”—with important lessons for how future efforts can rebuild trust in post-pandemic times.

Young users' social media addiction: causes, consequences and preventions

PurposeSocial media addiction has been an ongoing topic of debate for platform developers, well-being and mental health experts. There is a limited understanding of the factors leading to the addiction of young social media users, the consequences of experiencing addiction, and the measures/mechanisms used by parents and platform providers to limit/prevent problematic social media use amongst young users. This systematic review aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the literature concerning these issues.Design/methodology/approachThe Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews (PRISMA) protocol was used to evaluate and present the results. A total of 45 studies were screened and independently reviewed against predetermined criteria for eligibility.FindingsThe results revealed four categories of young users' addiction to social media networks (social, technological, behavioural and mental). Several prevention approaches directed at parents and platform providers were discussed.Originality/valueThis study offers important insights for health policy makers, platform providers, parents and researchers on designing interventions addressing social media addiction amongst young users. It also provides an in-depth understanding of the conceptualization of social media addiction and suggestions on possible actions to prevent it.

Tracking Public Attitudes toward COVID-19 Vaccination on Tweets in Canada: Using Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (Preprint)

BACKGROUND The development and approval of COVID-19 vaccines have generated optimism for the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and a return to normalcy. However, vaccine hesitancy, often fueled by misinformation poses a major barrier to achieving herd immunity. OBJECTIVE We aim to investigate Twitter users’ attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccination in Canada after vaccine rollout. METHODS We applied a weakly-supervised aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) technique on COVID-19 vaccination-related tweets in Canada. Automatically-generated aspect and opinion terms were manually corrected by public health experts to ensure the accuracy of the terms and make them more domain-specific. Then, based on these manually corrected terms, the system inferred sentiments toward the aspects. We observed sentiments toward key aspects related to COVID-19 vaccination, and investigated how sentiment toward “vaccination” changed over time. In addition, we analyzed the most retweeted/liked tweets by observing most frequent nouns and sentiments toward key aspects. RESULTS After training tweets using an ABSA system, we obtained 108 aspect terms (e.g., “immunity” and “pfizer”) and 6,793 opinion terms (e.g., “trustworthy” for the positive sentiment and “jeopardize” for the negative sentiment). While manually verifying/editing these terms, our public health experts selected 20 key aspects related to COVID-19 vaccination for more analysis. The results showed that the top-ranked automatically-extracted aspects include “risk”, “delay”, and “hope”. The sentiment analysis results for the 20 key aspects revealed negative sentiments related to “vaccine distribution”, “side effects”, “allergy”, “reactions” and “anti-vaxxer”, and positive sentiments related to “vaccine campaign”, “vaccine candidates”, and “immune response”. All these results indicate that the Twitter users express concerns about the safety of vaccines, but still consider vaccines as the option to end the pandemic. In addition, compared to the sentiment of all the tweets, the most retweeted/liked tweets showed more positive sentiment overall, especially about vaccination itself. When looking more closely, the most retweeted/liked tweets showed an interesting dichotomy in Twitter users, i.e., the “anti-vaxxer” population who used a negative sentiment as a means to discourage vaccination and the “Covid Zero” population who used negative sentiments to encourage vaccinations while critiquing the public health response. CONCLUSIONS This study is the first to examine public sentiments toward COVID-19 vaccination on tweets over an extended period of time in Canada. Our findings could inform public health agencies to design and implement interventions to promote vaccination, and get closer to the goal of ending the pandemic.