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31 October 2013
WHAT'S NEW IN THE TELL ME PROJECT
The recent polio outbreak in Israel – and the vaccination campaign that followed – represented a testing ground for public institutions, which reexamined their public communication strategies after all the mistakes made during the A-H1N1 pandemic in 2009.
Concurrently with such an event, from 2nd to 4th October, Israel also hosted a meeting within the TELLME Project (Transparent communication in Epidemics: Learning Lessons from experience, delivering effective Messages, providing Evidence), an international project co-funded by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Community. Aim of the meeting was the validation of a communication model – developed by the workgroup led by Manfred Green, from the School of Public Health of the University of Haifa – that should be followed in case of an infectious disease outbreak.
During the recent meeting in Haifa, Professor William Fisher, of Western University in London, Ontario, analyzed the reasons of vaccine hesitancy or refusal and how to overcome it. This is a very important topic in view of a possible pandemics, in which the preparedness of states could be compromized by population’s reluctancy to be vaccinated. Both the aspects of people’s attitude to vaccines and of the weight of narratives and urban myths in this field have been deepened by documents already produced by TELLME project.
VIDEO
The interview
Preparedness and uncertainty about future pandemics in the words of two Nobel Prizes: According to Peter Doherty and Rolf Zinkernagel, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, we are much better prepared for pandemics now than in the past. But uncertainty is still an issue.
NEWS
An article recently published inSciencehas put forward a strong case for tapping into online sentiment and behaviour displayed on social networks to predict how the public respond during infectious disease outbreaks.
The authors, Bauch and Galvani, claim that analysing comments on social networks about public health topics such as paediatric vaccine coverage, pandemic flu vaccination and acceptance of quarantine during the SARS outbreak, can help gain a greater insight into how ideas spread and influence behaviour.
India is facing an aggressive outbreak of dengue fever – probably the worst in the last ten years – and risk communication from authorities proved to be very ineffective: the lack of proper strategies for both prevention and reaction to dengue outbreaks resulted in low levels of public awareness and poor coordination between different institutions. A series of mistakes for which India is now paying the price: so far, more than 38,000 cases have been reported by the Indian Ministry of Health across the country since January, with 109 deaths.
The Ecdc released the Rapid Risk Assessment on Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (Mers CoV), which reported that Europe is still at risk of an importation of MERS-CoV. Such a risk may also increase due to the increasing number of visitors that will move to the EU to Saudi Arabia in October, to join the Hajj pilgrimage.
So far, twelve cases have been reported outside of the Middle East: United Kingdom (4), Italy (1), France (2), Germany (2) and Tunisia (3), while the number of new cases per month in Saudi Arabia has increased tenfold since April 2013.
Interferon-alpha 2b (IFN-α2b) and Ribavirin are two licensed antiviral drugs that protects monkeys from MERS virus, as reported by a research team from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in cooperation with Canadian and French scientists.
An outbreak of a highly pathogenic avian influenza virus struck a commercial farm of layer hens near Ferrara, Italy. The farmer timely informed about suspect clinical signs, thus allowing the detection of the disease. The diagnostic tests were performed by the Experimental Zooprophylactic Institute and by the National Laboratory in Padua, and revealed that the virus belong to the H7 subtype, whilst further diagnostic examination to determine its N type are ongoing.
A protection zone of 3 km and a surveillance zone of 10 km have been established around the farm, which is under restriction.
A recent paper on the New England Journal of Medicine highlighted some of the features that make H7N9 – the bird flu virus now circulating in China – a healthcare case that deserves attention. The first is a diffuse lack of immunity against this strain, due to the scarce exposure on a large scale to hemagglutinin 7 (H7) and neuraminidase 9 (N9) antigens. The second are some genomic signs of adaptation to mammals. The third is the difficulty to spot it in bird flocks, due to its low pathogenicity in birds.
Most of the main threats to our health do not respect national borders, as clearly proved by the novel Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV). For this reason, on July 3rd the European Parliament voted in favour of the Decision on Serious Cross-border Threats to Health, a Directive that includes common procedures and standards for a better coordination between EU countries against communicable diseases and health threats caused by chemical, biological or environmental events.
A group of researcher from the National Coordination Centre for Outbreak Management, Netherlands, carried out an empirical and qualitative study to evaluate the use of the web during the enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) outbreak that occurred in Germany in 2011. For one month during the outbreak, a total of 18 participants were asked to keep a diary, which was integrated with a demographic survey before the beginning of the study and a questionnaire at the end.
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