Pharmageek
Among the many COVID-19 vaccine myths circulating on social media, one of the more persistent false rumors is that the vaccine causes infertility, according to leading doctors.
Rumors about vaccines impacting fertility have been rampant and difficult to overcome, Susan Bailey, M.D., immediate past president of the American Medical Association, told lawmakers on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
Doctors play a critical role as vaccination ambassadors, Bailey testified Tuesday during a hearing to address vaccine hesitancy.
"Physicians need to be part empathetic counselors, part research scientists and part myth busters," she said.
But in their efforts to debunk vaccine myths, doctors are trying to combat a deluge of misinformation and false stories rampantly spreading on social media platforms like Facebook, which fuel fears about the COVID-19 vaccine.
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COVID-19 is impacting people worldwide and is currently a leading cause of death in many countries. Underlying factors, including Social Determinants of Health (SDoH), could contribute to these statistics. Our prior work has explored associations between SDoH and several adverse health outcomes (eg, asthma and obesity). Our findings reinforce the emerging consensus that SDoH factors should be considered when implementing intelligent public health surveillance solutions to inform public health policies and interventions.
Objective: This study sought to redefine the Healthy People 2030’s SDoH taxonomy to accommodate the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, we aim to provide a blueprint and implement a prototype for the Urban Population Health Observatory (UPHO), a web-based platform that integrates classified group-level SDoH indicators to individual- and aggregate-level population health data.
Methods: The process of building the UPHO involves collecting and integrating data from several sources, classifying the collected data into drivers and outcomes, incorporating data science techniques for calculating measurable indicators from the raw variables, and studying the extent to which interventions are identified or developed to mitigate drivers that lead to the undesired outcomes.
Results: We generated and classified the indicators of social determinants of health, which are linked to COVID-19. To display the functionalities of the UPHO platform, we presented a prototype design to demonstrate its features. We provided a use case scenario for 4 different users.
Conclusions: UPHO serves as an apparatus for implementing effective interventions and can be adopted as a global platform for chronic and infectious diseases. The UPHO surveillance platform provides a novel approach and novel insights into immediate and long-term health policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and other future public health crises. The UPHO assists public health organizations and policymakers in their efforts in reducing health disparities, achieving health equity, and improving urban population health.
access the study at https://publichealth.jmir.org/2021/6/e28269/
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During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, rapid and accurate triage of patients at the emergency department is critical to inform decision-making.
We propose a data-driven approach for automatic prediction of deterioration risk using a deep neural network that learns from chest X-ray images and a gradient boosting model that learns from routine clinical variables.
Our AI prognosis system, trained using data from 3661 patients, achieves an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.786 (95% CI: 0.745–0.830) when predicting deterioration within 96 hours.
The deep neural network extracts informative areas of chest X-ray images to assist clinicians in interpreting the predictions and performs comparably to two radiologists in a reader study. In order to verify performance in a real clinical setting, we silently deployed a preliminary version of the deep neural network at New York University Langone Health during the first wave of the pandemic, which produced accurate predictions in real-time.
In summary, our findings demonstrate the potential of the proposed system for assisting front-line physicians in the triage of COVID-19 patients.
read the open article at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-021-00453-0
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Contact tracing aims to avoid transmission by isolating, at an early stage, only those individuals who are infectious or potentially infectious, to minimize the societal costs associated with isolation. Considerable resources are therefore directed at improving surveillance capacities to allow efficient and rapid investigation and isolation of cases and their contacts. To enhance tracing capacities, the use of digital technologies has been proposed, leveraging the widespread use of smartphones. Therefore, proximity-sensing applications have been designed and made available to automatically trace contacts, notify users about potential exposure to COVID-19, and invite them to isolate.
The efficacy of digital contact tracing against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic is debated: Smartphone penetration is limited in many countries, with low coverage among the elderly, the most vulnerable to COVID-19.
Quantifying the impact of digital contact tracing is essential to envision this strategy within a wider response plan against the COVID-19 epidemic.
We modeled this intervention together with household isolation assuming a 50% detection of clinical cases. In a scenario of high transmissibility (R = 2.6), we found that household isolation by itself would produce a reduction in peak incidence of 27%, while the inclusion of digital contact tracing could increase this effect by 30% for a reasonably achievable app adoption (~20% of the population) and by 144% for a large-scale app adoption (~60%). At a moderate transmissibility level (R = 1.7), the app would substantially damp transmission (36 to 89% peak incidence reduction for increasing app adoption), bringing the epidemic to manageable levels if adopted by 32% of the population or more.
The app-based tracing and household isolation have different effects across settings, the first intervention efficiently preventing transmissions at work that are not well targeted by the second.
Moreover, app-based contact tracing also yields a protection for the elderly despite the lower penetration of smartphones in this age category.
These results may inform the inclusion of digital contact tracing within a COVID-19 response plan.
read the study at https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/15/eabd8750
Lire l'article complet sur : advances.sciencemag.org