scholarly journals Network relationships of U.S. government health agencies in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic

Author(s):  
Seungil Yum ◽  

Introduction. Government institutes, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Department of Health and Human Services, play important but different roles dealing with COVID-19 in the USA. Method. This study used NodeXL between June 7 and June 8 to visualise the social networks of the Centers and the Department by collecting 5,166 (the Centers) and 2,940 tweets (the Department). Analysis. Examined the characteristics of centrality of the two networks and used cluster analysis to identify communication groups. Results. Findings confirmed that the Centers demonstrate characteristics of people-based online networks, whereas the Department appears as an institutes-based online networks. Second, offline social networks play an essential role in online social networks. Third, the Centers had a greater impact on the networks in the Department network than the effect the Department had on the Centers. Fourth, some key players, such as the World Health Organization, play a pivotal role in both networks. Conclusions. Governments should explore the different types of health information of government institutes to effectively cope with the COVID-19 pandemic.

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abhiman Cheeyandira

Abstract Corona virus pandemic has affected all the 50 states in the USA. States such as NY, CA and WA being the most affected. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website, as of 28 March 2020, the total number of cases in the USA is over 103 300 and number of deaths to 1668. In the coming weeks, COVID-19 rates are expected to begin skyrocketing and hit a peak in late April/May/June given lessons learned from China, Italy and others. COVID-19 has been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) as confirmed cases approach 575 444 patients with 26 654 deaths across over 160 countries, as of 28 March 2020. There is a lot of impact on management of the urgent and emergent cases. This article highlights the changes that are being made in delivering urgent and emergent surgical care during the pandemic.


2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 258-260
Author(s):  
V. M. Dudnyk ◽  
V. Н. Furman ◽  
I. I. Andrikevych ◽  
N. O. Buglova ◽  
O. V. Кutsak ◽  
...  

Annotation. Peculiarities of clinical course and differential diagnosis of multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C) in children with coronavirus infection are described. The main features of this disease are long-term fever, multiorgan dysfunction, laboratory signs of inflammation and positive tests for SARS-CoV-2 (polymerase chain reaction using reverse transcription (RT-PCR), antigen test or positive serological test). The criteria of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are used to confirm the MIS-C diagnosis.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy H. Perlis ◽  
Matthew Baum ◽  
Kristin Lunz Trujillo ◽  
David Lazer ◽  
Alauna Safarpour ◽  
...  

Recognizing that the protection conferred by COVID-19 vaccines may wane over time, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has encouraged adults in the United States to receive booster shots that can augment their immunity to the virus. While the Biden administration sought to encourage all adults to receive boosters, the CDC initially authorized the shots only for higher-risk individuals. Subsequently, authorization was broadened to all adults, although only higher-risk individuals were encouraged to pursue boosters. Most recently, after substantial criticism, the CDC changed its language to encourage all adults to receive boosters.But regardless of the language, are US adults sufficiently convinced to seek booster shots? Will the same factors that contributed to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and vaccine resistance impact booster shots? The answers may have profound public health implications as the US enters the season during which respiratory viruses typically have the greatest impact, and the highly-transmissible Omicron variant rapidly becomes the dominant form of COVID-19, after being labeled a variant of concern by the World Health Organization on November 26th.Between November 3rd and December 3rd, 2021, the COVID States Project asked 22,277 adults in all 50 US states and the District of Columbia about their attitudes and behaviors regarding COVID-19. In particular, we asked about whether people are vaccinated or intend to be vaccinated, and whether they had sought booster shots or intend to seek a booster shot. In this brief report, we examine attitudes toward COVID-19 booster shots, and whether they differ across particular groups of people. Since the survey was ongoing when news about Omicron emerged in the US, we also take an initial look at whether these attitudes have begun to shift along with perceptions of the threat posed by COVID-19 subsequent to the November 26th announcement.


Author(s):  
Jingwen Zhang ◽  
Damon Centola

While social comparison research has focused on the processes and consequences of how the comparer gleans information from the comparison other (individual or group), recent research on social networks demonstrates how information and influence are distributed across persons in a network. This chapter reviews social influence processes in social networks. The authors first review recent research on social comparison and its negative consequences in online social networks. Then the authors delve into discussing the social network causes of biased social perceptions online and how this can be remedied by building more accurate perceptions through constructed online networks. Lastly, the authors discuss findings from recent experimental studies that illustrate how constructed online networks can harness social comparison to induce significant changes in health behavior.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Katherine Hickey ◽  
Annie Emmons

Recent data from the US Department of Health and Human Services indicate a small but growing number of unvaccinated children under the age of two. Low vaccination rates can result in outbreaks of preventable diseases and even death. The World Health Organization (WHO) identified vaccine hesitancy as one of the top ten threats to global health in 2019.


10.2196/26392 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. e26392
Author(s):  
Corey H Basch ◽  
Joseph Fera ◽  
Isabela Pierce ◽  
Charles E Basch

Background Over the past decade, there has been an increasing secular trend in the number of studies on social media and health. Objective The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to examine the content and characteristics of TikTok videos that are related to an important aspect of community mitigation—the use of masks as a method for interrupting the transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Methods In total, 100 trending videos with the hashtag #WearAMask (ie, a campaign on TikTok), along with 32 videos that were posted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and involved masks in any way (ie, all related WHO videos at the time of this study), were included in our sample. We collected the metadata of each post, and created content categories based on fact sheets that were provided by the WHO and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We used these fact sheets to code the characteristics of mask use. Results Videos that were posted on TikTok and had the hashtag #WearAMask garnered almost 500 million views, and videos that were posted by the WHO garnered almost 57 million views. Although the ratio of the number of trending #WearAMask videos to the number of WHO videos was around 3:1, the #WearAMask videos received almost 10 times as many cumulative views as the WHO videos. In total, 68% (68/100) of the trending #WearAMask videos involved humor and garnered over 355 million cumulative views. However, only 9% (3/32) of the WHO videos involved humor. Furthermore, 27% (27/100) of the trending #WearAMask videos involved dance and garnered over 130 million cumulative views, whereas none of the WHO videos involved dance. Conclusions This study is one of the first to describe how TikTok is being used to mitigate the community spread of COVID-19 by promoting mask use. Due to the platform’s incredible reach, TikTok has great potential in conveying important public health messages to various segments of the population.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 368 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Wróbel ◽  
Małgorzata Przybyło ◽  
Ewa Stępień

(1) Despite many years of research, melanoma still remains a big challenge for modern medicine. The purpose of this article is to review publicly available clinical trials to find trends regarding the number of trials, their location, and interventions including the most frequently studied drugs and their combinations. (2) We surveyed clinical trials registered in the International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP), one of the largest databases on clinical trials. The search was performed on 30 November 2018 using the term “melanoma”. Data have been supplemented with the information obtained from publicly available data repositories including PubMed, World Health Organization, National Cancer Institute, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, European Cancer Information System, and many others to bring the historical context of this study. (3) Among the total of 2563 clinical trials included in the analysis, most have been registered in the USA (1487), which is 58% of the total. The most commonly studied drug in clinical trials was ipilimumab, described as applied intervention in 251 trials. (4) An increase in the number of melanoma clinical trials using immunomodulating monoclonal antibody therapies, small molecule-targeted therapies (inhibitors of BRAF, MEK, CDK4/6), and combination therapies is recognized. This illustrates the tendency towards precision medicine.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Devon J. Eddins ◽  
Leda C. Bassit ◽  
Joshua Chandler ◽  
Natalie S. Haddad ◽  
Kathryn Musall ◽  
...  

In late 2019, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) emerged from Wuhan, China spurring the Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic that has resulted in over 219 million confirmed cases and nearly 4.6 million deaths worldwide. Intensive research efforts ensued to constrain SARS-CoV-2 and reduce COVID-19 disease burden. Due to the severity of this disease, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) recommend that manipulation of active viral cultures of SARS-CoV-2 and respiratory secretions from COVID-19 patients be performed in biosafety level 3 (BSL3) containment laboratories. Therefore, it is imperative to develop viral inactivation procedures that permit samples to be transferred and manipulated at lower containment levels (i.e., BSL2), and maintain the fidelity of downstream assays to expedite the development of medical countermeasures (MCMs). We demonstrate optimal conditions for complete viral inactivation following fixation of infected cells with paraformaldehyde solution or other commonly-used branded reagents for flow cytometry, UVC inactivation in sera and respiratory secretions for protein and antibody detection assays, heat inactivation following cDNA amplification of single-cell emulsions for droplet-based single-cell mRNA sequencing applications, and extraction with an organic solvent for metabolomic studies. Thus, we provide a suite of protocols for viral inactivation of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 patient samples for downstream contemporary immunology assays that facilitate sample transfer to BSL2, providing a conceptual framework for rapid initiation of high-fidelity research as the COVID-19 pandemic continues.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 839-842
Author(s):  
Navid Shaghaghi ◽  
Andres Calle ◽  
George Kouretas ◽  
Jaidev Mirchandani ◽  
Michael Castillo

Abstract Vaccination is the primary strategy to prevent COVID-19 illness and hospitalization. However, supplies are scarce and due to the regional mutations of the virus, new vaccines or booster shots will need to be administered potentially regularly. Hence, the prediction of the rate of growth of COVID-19 cases is paramount to ensuring the ample supply of vaccines as well as for local, state, and federal government measures to ensure the availability of hospital beds, supplies, and staff. eVision is an epidemic forecaster aimed at combining Machine Learning (ML) - in the form of a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recursive Neural Network (RNN) - and search engine statistics, in order to make accurate predictions about the weekly number of cases for highly communicable diseases. By providing eVision with the relative popularity of carefully selected keywords searched via Google along with the number of positive cases reported from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and/or the World Health Organization (WHO) the model can make highly accurate predictions about the trend of the outbreak by learning the relationship between the two trends. Thus, in order to predict the trend of the outbreak in a specific region, eVision is provided with a weekly count of the number of COVID-19 cases in a region along with statistics surrounding common symptom search phrases such as “loss of smell” and “loss of taste” that have been searched on Google in that region since the start of the pandemic. eVision has, for instance, been able to achieve an accuracy of %89 for predicting the trend of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States


2006 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominique Roberfroid ◽  
Marie-Paule Lerude ◽  
Armando Pérez-Cueto ◽  
Patrick Kolsteren

AbstractIn 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) produced a revised growth reference. This has already been used in different settings outside the USA. Using data obtained during a nutritional survey in Madagascar, we compare results produced by using both the 2000 CDC and the 1978 National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)/World Health Organization (WHO) growth references. We show that changing the reference has an important impact on nutritional diagnosis. In particular, the prevalence of wasting is greatly increased. This could generate substantial operational and clinical difficulties. We recommend continued use of the 1978 NCHS/WHO reference until release of the new WHO multi-country growth charts.


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