Search Results (36)

The management of public health projects in a BANI (brittle, anxious, non-linear, incomprehensible) environment, exemplified by the ongoing war in Ukraine, presents unprecedented challenges due to fragile systems, heightened uncertainty, and complex socio-political dynamics. This study proposes an AI-driven framework to enhance the resilience and effectiveness of public health interventions under such conditions. By integrating a coupled SEIR–Infodemic–Panicdemic Model with war-specific factors, we simulate the interplay of infectious disease spread, misinformation dissemination, and panic dynamics over 1500 days in a Ukrainian city (Kharkiv). The model incorporates time-varying parameters to account for population displacement, healthcare disruptions, and periodic war events, reflecting the evolving conflict context. Sensitivity and risk–opportunity analyses reveal that disease transmission, misinformation, and infrastructure damage significantly exacerbate epidemic peaks, while AI-enabled interventions, such as fact-checking, mental health support, and infrastructure recovery, offer substantial mitigation potential. Qualitative assessments identify technical, organisational, ethical, regulatory, and military risks, alongside opportunities for predictive analytics, automation, and equitable healthcare access. Quantitative simulations demonstrate that risks, like increased displacement, can amplify infectious peaks by up to 28.3%, whereas opportunities, like enhanced fact-checking, can reduce misinformation by 18.2%. These findings provide a roadmap for leveraging AI to navigate BANI environments, offering actionable insights for public health practitioners in Ukraine and other crisis settings. The study underscores AI’s transformative role in fostering adaptive, data-driven strategies to achieve sustainable health outcomes amidst volatility and uncertainty. Full article

Introduction: Public health disinformation is a significant problem as demonstrated by the recent scientific literature on the COVID-19 pandemic. However, further studies that analyse the presence of the disinformation mitigation strategies in public health initiatives within specific contexts and which contains a multidimensional approach (gender, social and environmental) are required. Evidence shows that disinformation, information overload, misinformation or fake news on health issues are also influenced by these issues. Objective: The inclusion of the health disinformation dimension within national public implemented by the governments of Argentina and Spain before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, this paper incorporated a gender-based approach and social and environmental determinants in order to identify the limitations of these initiatives and offer certain recommendations. We conducted a descriptive, qualitative and quantitative study, as well as content analysis. We focused on documents from the websites of the national health ministries of Argentina and Spain, and digital repositories of regulations at the national level. Various strategies for systematic searches on government websites were designed and implemented. This included manual searches on Google. The first step involved a general analysis of all documents found by the searches, followed by a qualitative analysis of the documents that were related to health issues. Based on this work, a comprehensive and flexible framework of (pre-established and emerging) dimensions and categories of health disinformation and infodemics was generated. Results. The work was based on a total of 202 documents (both downloadable information and information included in websites); 117 for Argentina and 85 for Spain. Of the total, 60.9% were published during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the second stage of the analysis, 55 texts were selected for Argentina and 47 for Spain. In both countries, the central communications approach used was disinformation and/or infodemics (although definitions such as fake news were also used). They were mainly linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, but other emerging health problems were also detected to a lesser degree. However, disinformation (or a related concept) was prominently present in only 17 documents in Argentina and 3 documents in Spain. In terms of document type, working materials were foremost in Argentina (44.4%) and Spain (37.6%), with little presence of policy, regulatory and evaluation documents (only 5). Gender binary language was predominantly used in these texts. Vulnerable groups and social determinants were poorly included. Environmental determinants were mentioned in conjunction with health disinformation in only one paper on the use of plastics and its impact on human health in Argentina, and in another paper from the Global Summit on Climate and Health in Spain. Conclusions: Based on the document analysis, the inclusion of health disinformation within public actions in both countries before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, was detected. However, different limitations were observed: it was clear that the problem was strongly linked to the health emergency and did not extend much beyond that. Health disinformation was secondary and did not play a key role in public policy nor did it have greater institutional importance. Limitations were also detected in terms of gender perspectives, vulnerable groups and social and environmental determinants linked to health disinformation, displaying a reductionist approach. Based on these results, this paper makes certain policy recommendations. Full article

Major global public health emergencies face unprecedented challenges, such as an infodemic and scientific disputes, and governments especially need to implement fast and effective crisis communication. Firstly, this paper takes the Elaboration Likelihood Model as a framework and constructs a crisis communication persuasion effect evaluation method with emotion analysis. Secondly, this paper takes the crisis communication at the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in China as an example and examines the persuasive effects of the peripheral route, represented by medical experts, and the central route, represented by mainstream media. This study finds that the peripheral route of persuasive communication can quickly establish communication trust and quickly change the public’s peripheral attitude, but the persuasive effect is unstable. The central route of persuasive communication demonstrates a significantly positive, stable, and anti-interference persuasive effect. Dual-subject persuasion is an important strategy for controlling an outbreak by rapidly establishing communication trust, combating an infodemic, boosting public confidence, and popularizing medical knowledge. This study evaluates the persuasive effects of crisis communication in the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak in China, hoping to provide valuable practical references for crisis communication during the outbreak in future global public health emergencies. Full article

Staying well informed about the evolving COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine recommendations is vital for older adults, especially for low-income older adults, who have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. However, the overwhelming infodemic poses a significant challenge, affecting vaccine decision-making. This study explores how a group of predominantly low-income older adults navigate health information and how their trust in information and vaccines evolves throughout the pandemic. Our objective is to provide insights that will guide future public health messaging for this demographic. Analyzing qualitative data from 77 older adults (aged 65 to 94) collected through focus groups and interviews, our findings reveal that participants’ experiences with information overload eroded their trust in authority, leading to vaccine hesitancy. Moreover, the need for a booster has affected belief in vaccine safety and efficacy. As participants lost faith in the media and authoritative sources, they increasingly leaned on personal networks for guidance. These results underscore the urgent necessity for clear, unambiguous ongoing vaccine guidance to restore institutional trust among older adults. Additionally, recognizing the influential role of direct networks in vaccine decisions, integrating care workers, service providers, and peer-to-peer support into health messaging mechanisms could prove valuable. Full article

This article shows the use of Twitter that the main official spokespersons of the Spanish government made during the first weeks of the pandemic, with the aim of analyzing how government health campaigns were managed during the exceptional period of the state of alarm to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and whether the instructions in terms of institutional management of communication to combat the infodemic set by the World Health Organization (WHO) were followed. This research considers the diffusion of official information in different phases of the first three months of the government’s action (102 days) from the outbreak of COVID-19 in Spain (March 2020) and how it developed its approach to crisis communication using the Twitter accounts of the President of the Spanish government (@sanchezcastejon), front-line leaders and the Ministry of Health (@sanidadgob), the main public institution responsible for health crisis management with the hashtags #EsteVirusLoParamosUnidos and #COVID-19. The results of a sample of 750 tweets reveal how the official sources used a model of online communication with a particular emphasis on informative and motivational tweets from leaders aimed at audiences (media and the general public). At the same time, there is also an instructive function about the pandemic towards audiences (general public and companies), with the Ministry and health authorities playing a key, proactive role in an attempt to achieve informative transparency to mitigate the pandemic and infodemic. Full article

The recent COVID-19 health crisis has shone a spotlight on disinformation as the circulation of false information became more and more prominent. What the World Health Organization (WHO) has defined as an ‘infodemic’ poses a great risk for democracies and for society in general. In this context, public television channels, with their regional scope, actively participate in the fight against misinformation. This research aims to identify and classify the different verification initiatives and technological tools, as well as the different strategies and codes used in fact-checking tasks by European broadcasters belonging to the CIRCOM network. The methodology undertakes an exploratory approach and employs a questionnaire that is applied to a sample of the members of the network. Managers and professionals with executive profiles were asked about the management, operation and strategies used in the verification process. In light of the results obtained, it can be concluded that the current verification processes are based on human efforts, rather than technological tools, amounting to a total dependence on content curation by the writing teams in the newsroom. Thus, it is evidenced that in most cases, there is neither a specific department for verification, nor sufficient resources, despite the fact that all those surveyed regard disinformation as a priority issue, a threat to democratic integrity and a responsibility of public service media. Full article

The spread of fake news related to COVID-19 is an infodemic that leads to a public health crisis. Therefore, detecting fake news is crucial for an effective management of the COVID-19 pandemic response. Studies have shown that machine learning models can detect COVID-19 fake news based on the content of news articles. However, the use of biomedical information, which is often featured in COVID-19 news, has not been explored in the development of these models. We present a novel approach for predicting COVID-19 fake news by leveraging biomedical information extraction (BioIE) in combination with machine learning models. We analyzed 1164 COVID-19 news articles and used advanced BioIE algorithms to extract 158 novel features. These features were then used to train 15 machine learning classifiers to predict COVID-19 fake news. Among the 15 classifiers, the random forest model achieved the best performance with an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.882, which is 12.36% to 31.05% higher compared to models trained on traditional features. Furthermore, incorporating BioIE-based features improved the performance of a state-of-the-art multi-modality model (AUC 0.914 vs. 0.887). Our study suggests that incorporating biomedical information into fake news detection models improves their performance, and thus could be a valuable tool in the fight against the COVID-19 infodemic. Full article

In the climate of great uncertainty characterizing the COVID-19 pandemic, health communication played a significant role: several communicative strategies and channels were used to inform, educate and alert. Entropy-related risks were soon translated into the “infodemic”, a wide-spread phenomenon with psychosocial and cultural roots. Therefore, new challenges for public institutions occurred: public health communication, especially expressed through advertising and audiovisual spots, was engaged to offer key support in combatting the disease, mitigating its effects and supporting health and psychological wellbeing. This work aims to investigate how the Italian public institutions addressed those challenges by employing institutional spots. We tried to answer two main research questions: (a) in line with the literature concerning persuasive communication, what were the main variables that social advertising concerning health attitudes and behaviors relied on; and (b) how the different variables were combined to propose specific communicative pathways following both the different waves/phases of the COVID-19 pandemic and the elaboration likelihood model. To answer these questions, 34 Italian spots were analyzed by means of qualitative multimodal analysis (including scopes, major narratives themes, central and peripheral cues). The results enabled us to individuate different communicative pathways, oriented by inclusivity, functionality and contamination, in line with different rounds as well as with the holistic configurations of cultural narratives, central and peripheral cues. Full article

To understand the susceptibility to nutrition-health misinformation related to preventing, treating, or mitigating the risk of COVID-19 during the initial lockdowns around the world, the present international web-based survey study (15 April–15 May 2020) gauged participants’ (n = 3707) level of nutrition-health misinformation discernment by presenting them with 25 statements (including unfounded or unproven claims circulated at the time), alongside the influence of information sources of varying quality on the frequency of changes in their eating behavior and the extent of misinformation held, depending on the source used for such changes. Results revealed widespread misinformation about food, eating, and health practices related to COVID-19, with the 25 statements put to participants receiving up to 43% misinformed answers (e.g., ‘It is safe to eat fruits and vegetables that have been washed with soap or diluted bleach’). Whereas higher quality information sources (nutrition scientists, nutrition professionals) had the biggest influence on eating behavior change, we found greater misinformation susceptibility when relying on poor quality sources for changing diet. Appropriate discernment of misinformation was weakest amongst participants who more frequently changed their eating behavior because of information from poor quality sources, suggesting disparities in the health risks/safety of the changes performed. Full article

The article presents the results of research of public opinion during the third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Russia. The study touches on the attitude of citizens to public health, as well as the reaction of social media users to government measures in a crisis situation during a pandemic. Special attention is paid to the phenomenon of infodemic and methods of detecting cases of the spread of false and unverified information about diseases. The article demonstrates the application of an interdisciplinary approach using network analysis of texts and sociological research. A model for detecting social stress in the textual communication of social network users using a specially trained neural network and linguistic analysis methods is presented. The validity and validity of the results of the analysis of social network data were verified using a sociological survey. This approach allows us to identify points of tension in matters of public health promotion, during crisis situations to improve interaction between the government and society, and to timely adjust government plans and actions to ensure resilience in emergency situations for public health purposes. Full article

Digital media has remained problematic during COVID-19 because it has been the source of false and unverified facts. This was particularly evident in the widespread misinformation and confusion regarding the COVID-19 vaccine. Past research suggested infodemics, conspiracy beliefs, and religious fatalism as potential threats to public COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. However, the literature is primarily void of empirical evidence associating demographic attributes with efforts to build vaccine hesitancy. Therefore, this research uses two studies: (Study 1) Google Trends and (Study 2) survey method to provide inclusive empirical insight into public use of digital media during COVID-19 and the detrimental effects of infodemics, conspiracy beliefs, and religious fatalism as they were related to building COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Using Google Trends based on popular keywords the public searched over one year, Study 1 explores public digital media use during COVID-19. Drawing on this exploration, Study 2 used a cross-sectional national representative survey of 2120 adult Pakistanis to describe the influence of potential hazards such as infodemics on public vaccine hesitancy. Study 2 revealed that infodemics, conspiracy beliefs, and religious fatalism predict vaccine hesitancy. In addition, gender moderates the relationship between infodemics and conspiracy beliefs and vaccine hesitancy. This implies that there is a dispositional effect of the infodemics and conspiracy beliefs spread digitally. This study’s findings benefit health and other concerned authorities to help them reduce religious fatalism, vaccine hesitancy, and conspiracy theories with targeted communication campaigns on digital media. Full article

Objectives: This paper aimed to provide a systematic review of relevant articles from the perspectives of literature distribution, research hotspots, and existing results to obtain the frontier directions in the field of disinformation. Methods: We analyzed disinformation publications published between 2002 and 2021 using bibliometric methods based on the Web of Science. There were 5666 papers analyzed using Derwent Data Analyzer (DDA). Results: The result shows that the USA was the most influential country in this area, while Ecker and Lewandowsky from the University of Western Australia published the largest volumes of papers. Keywords such as “social media”, “COVID-19”, and “vaccination” have gained immense popularity recently. Conclusions: We summarized four themes that are of the biggest concern to scholars: group heterogeneity of misinformation in memory, disinformation mechanism in social media, public health related to COVID-19, and application of big data technology in the infodemic. The future agenda of disinformation is summarized from three aspects: the mechanism of disinformation, social media users, and the application of algorithms. This work can be a meaningful resource for researchers’ study in the area of disinformation. Full article

Conspiracy theories accompany the emergence of infectious diseases and the 2022 multi-country monkeypox (MPX) outbreak is no exception. It is possible that the adoption of conspiracy beliefs negatively impacts health behavior. We aimed to assess the prevalence of conspiratorial attitudes towards emerging virus infections (EVIs) and the response measures aiming to control these infections among the general public in Jordan. In addition, we assessed MPX knowledge and the belief in the role of men who have sex with men (MSM) in virus spread. The online survey data were collected during 24 May 2022–28 June 2022. The survey instrument was based on previously published scales designed to measure MPX knowledge and EVI conspiracies. A total of 611 respondents formed the final study sample, with a mean age of 44 years and a majority of females (n = 433, 70.9%). On a scale ranging from −10 to +10, the median MPX knowledge score in the study sample was +3 (interquartile range: +1 to +5). Educational level was a determinant of MPX knowledge in multivariate analysis. More than 50% of the participants agreed at least to some extent with 9 out of 12 of the EVI conspiracy items. Multivariate analysis showed that embracing conspiracy beliefs about EVIs was associated with being female, and agreeing with or having no opinion regarding the role of MSM in MPX spread. The current study revealed the high prevalence of belief in conspiracies surrounding EVIs, and its accompanying intervention measures, among the general public in Jordan. In addition, a lower level of MPX knowledge was observed compared to previous studies among university students and health professionals in the country. We recommend evaluating the impact of the widely prevalent conspiracy beliefs on health aspects in future studies. This aim is particularly relevant in the Middle Eastern countries where embracing specific conspiracy ideas is a common occurrence. Full article

An infodemic represents a concern for public health, influencing the general population’s perceptions of key health issues. Misinformation is rapidly spread by social media, particularly among young generations. We used data from the WHO “Social Media and COVID-19” study, which was conducted in 24 countries worldwide on over 23,000 subjects aged 18–40 years, to explore Generation Z and Millennials’ models for health-information-seeking behaviors on social media. We summarized data on the most used sources of information, content of interest, and content sharing, as well as the sentiment toward the infodemic, through descriptive statistics and Chi-square test to verify the differences between groups. Among the survey respondents, 9475 (40.3%) were from high-income countries (HIC), 8000 (34.1%) from upper-middle-income countries (UMIC), and 6007 (25.6%) from lower-middle-income countries (LMIC). Social media were the most used sources of information to retrieve news on COVID-19 disease (about 79% in HIC, 87% in UMIC, and 90% in LIC) and the COVID-19 vaccine (about 78% in HIC and about 88% in UMIC and LIC). More than a half of the young respondents declared that they pay attention to scientific contents (about 51% in HIC, 59% in UMIC, and 55% in LMIC). Finally, most young participants reported feeling overwhelmed by the infodemic. However, this sentiment did not stop them from seeking information about COVID-19. Our findings highlight the importance of shaping public health interventions and campaigns on social media platforms and leveraging scientific contents. Public health authorities should work also on strategies to improve the digital literacy of the population as a driving force to empower them and achieve better health outcomes. Full article

The outbreak of COVID-19 at the end of 2019 triggered more psychological problems than usual among the public. During this epidemic, the use of social media was very high, and several studies confirmed a positive correlation between social media use and people’s psychological problems. The Chinese government has subsequently implemented a series of policies concerning the social media environment to tackle this “infodemic”. After the containment of the first COVID-19 outbreak, China saw a new wave of COVID-19 cases in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province in January 2021. How the optimized social media could have impacted public mental health remained to be revealed. Our research data come from an online survey of Chinese residents during the regional epidemic in Shijiazhuang, with a total of 904 valid samples from 18 different provinces in China. The results showed that this new round of outbreaks caused a high incidence of depression (38.9%) among the public. Compared with relatively advantaged groups, disadvantaged groups have a higher depression. Attributed to the optimization of the social media environment, the prevalence of social media use during the epidemic helped to markedly mitigate anxieties from depression. This is particularly demonstrated in vulnerable groups. We found, for the first time, a change in the relationship between social media use and resident depression, and more importantly, a stronger correlation between social media use and depression in relatively disadvantaged groups. Therefore, during the epidemic, actively optimizing the social media environment has a significant and positive effect on the mental health of residents, especially vulnerable groups. Full article