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.
Susanna Esposito, professor of Paediatrics at the University of Milan, Italy and president of WAIDID (World Association for Infectious Diseases), thinks that families need more information about safety and efficacy of vaccines, in order to overcome their growing hesitancy towards them.
Until the end, it seemed it could sort out to be a happy-ending story, a demonstration of how new social networks, renown for spreading misinformation, can also correct it, when used properly. But the unfortunately predictable finale showed the opposite: counteracting false ideas about vaccines is not that easy. It will take time, a big deal of patience, communication skills and a good, coordinated strategy as well.
It is never easy to develop definitions, especially when we are talking about something that is emerging and changing as we speak. This is the case for Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), an emerging process within European Framework Programs whose definition is new and evolving. However, we can certainly identify a number of key characteristics of RRI, which is an umbrella term including a wide variety of notions, coming from the academia and politics.
“We are so close to ending the polio” and “Still 15 years to a polio-free world” are not contradictory statements. They instead describe, with different degree of optimism, the current framework and the objective to be pursued in the fight against this disease. In other words, we are closer than ever to the target of a world free of polio, but much remains to be done to carry the world across the threshold. Polio eradication is the next issue public health authorities will be committed to in midterm future.
How many ways are there to tell a story and who will do it? In these months we tried to answer those questions by running an analysis of the most relevant tweets and accounts about some key words, chosen by the editorial board, focused on Zika virus and vaccines. We then developed an application to identify the most influential Twitter users on specific topics, according to a list of hashtag we have provided.
Preparedness is a key strategic element of an effective response to health threats. However, despite evident improvements in recent years, there is still large evidence of ineffective management of epidemic and pandemic events at any level, as the Ebola outbreak in West Africa recently showed.
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.
