Communication in pandemic times

 Communicating Science in Times of Crisis. The COVID-19 Pandemic

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part 1 Conceptualizing Communication Science and COVID-19 1

1. Managing Science Communication in a Pandemic 3

H. Dan O’Hair and Mary John O’Hair

2. Comprehending Covidiocy Communication: Dismisinformation, Conspiracy Theory, and Fake News 15

Brian H. Spitzberg

3. How Existential Anxiety Shapes Communication in Coping with the Coronavirus Pandemic: A Terror Management Theory Perspective 54

Claude H. Miller and Haijing Ma

Part 2 Promoting Health and Well-being 81

4. Communication and COVID-19: Challenges in Evidence-based Healthcare Design 83

Kevin Real, Kirk Hamilton, Terri Zborowsky, and Debbie Gregory

5. Identity and Information Overload: Examining the Impact of Health Messaging in Times of Crisis 110

Jessica Wendorf Muhamad and Patrick Merle

6. Social Media, Risk Perceptions Related to COVID-19, and Health Outcomes 128

Kevn B. Wright

7. Overcoming Obstacles to Collective Action by Communicating Compassion in Science 150

Erin B. Hester, Bobi Ivanov, and Kimberly A. Parker

8. Communicating the Science of COVID-19 to Children: Meet the Helpers 172

Jennifer Cook, Timothy L. Sellnow, Deanna D. Sellnow, Adam J. Parrish, and Rodrigo Soares

9. The Use of Telehealth in Behavioral Health and Educational Contexts During COVID-19 and Beyond 189

Alyssa Clements-Hickman, Jade Hollan, Christine Drew, Vanessa Hinton, and Robert J. Reese

Part 3 Advancing Models of Information and Media 215

10. Toward a New Model of Public Relations Crisis and Risk Communication Following Pandemics 217

Zifei Fay Chen, Zongchao Cathy Li, Yi Grace Ji, Don W. Stacks, and Bora Yook

11. Perspective Change in a Time of Crisis: The Emotion and Critical Reflection Model 242

Helen Lillie, Manusheela Pokharel, Mark J. Bergstrom, and Jakob D. Jensen

12. Social Media Surveillance and (Dis)Misinformation in the COVID-19 Pandemic 262

Brian H. Spitzberg, Ming-Hsiang Tsou, and Mark Gawron

13. Science Communication and Inoculation: Mitigating the Effects of the Coronavirus Outbreak 302

Bobi Ivanov and Kimberly A. Parker

Part 4 Examining Policy and Leadership 321

14. Communicating with Policymakers in a Pandemic 323

Michael T. Childress and Michael W. Clark

15. Equally Unpleasant Choices: Observations on School Leadership in a Time of Crisis 338

Justin M. Bathon and Lu S. Young

16. Controlling the Narrative: Mixed Messages and Presidential Credibility 358

Robert S. Littlefield

17. Communicating Death and Dying in the COVID-19 Pandemic 375

William Nowling and Matthew W. Seeger

Medical practice variation in oncology

 Atlas de variaciones en cirugía oncológica.

Why there is still so much variation in medical practice?

Some details inside this atlas.

Aliza Nisenbaum

The Silent Evolution in EU Health Law and Policy

 EU Health Law & Policy. The Expansion of EU Power in Public Health and Health Care

This book describes the expansion of EU power in health care and public health and analyses the implications of this expansion on EU health values and rights. The main conclusion of the book is that the EU is de facto balancing fundamental rights and values relating to health, implicitly taking on obligations for safeguarding fundamental rights in the field of health and affecting individuals’ rights sometimes without an explicit legal competence to do so. 

 

Biases and noise, two kinds of error

Noise, a flaw in human judgement

A new book by  Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein

A general property of noise is that you can recognize and measure it while knowing nothing about the target or bias. The general property of noise is essential for our purposes in this book, because many of our conclusions are drawn from judgments whose true answer is unknown or even unknowable. When physicians offer different diagnoses for the same patient, we can study their disagreement without knowing what ails the patient. When film executives estimate the market for a movie, we can study the variability of their answers without knowing how much the film eventually made or even if it was produced at all. We don’t need to know who is right to measure how much the judgments of the same case vary. All we have to do to measure noise is look at the back of the target.

To understand error in judgment, we must understand both bias and noise. Sometimes, as we will see, noise is the more important problem. But in public conversations about human error and in organizations all over the world, noise is rarely recognized. Bias is the star of the show. Noise is a bit player, usually offstage. The topic of bias has been discussed in thousands of scientific articles and dozens of popular books, few of which even mention the issue of noise. This book is our attempt to redress the balance.

 

Anthropocene, green arithmetic and capitalocene

 Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism

Formulated by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000, the Anthropocene concept proceeds from an eminently reasonable position: the biosphere and geological time has been fundamentally transformed by human activity. A new conceptualization of geological time—one that includes “mankind” as a “major geological force”—is necessary. This was a surely a courageous proposal. For to propose humanity as a geological agent is to transgress one of modernity’s fundamental intellectual boundaries. Scholars call this the “Two Cultures,” of the “natural” and “human” sciences (Snow 1957). At its best, the Anthropocene concept entwines human history and natural history—even if the “why” and the “how” remain unclear, and hotly debated. 

 Green Arithmetic. It is a curious term, but I can think none better to describe the basic procedure of environmental studies over the past few decades: Society plus Nature = History. Today it is Humanity, or Society, or Capitalism plus Nature = Catastrophe. I do not wish to disparage this model. It has been a powerful one. It has provided the philosophical basis for studies that have delivered a wealth of knowledge about environmental change. These studies, in turn, have allowed a deeper understanding of the what of the biosphere’s unfolding “state shift.” But they have not facilitated—indeed they have stymied—our understanding of how the present crisis will unfold in a world-system that is a world-ecology, joining power, nature, and accumulation in a dialectical and unstable unity.

 The Capitalocene. As I think the contributions to this volume clarify, the Capitalocene does not stand for capitalism as an economic and social system. It is not a radical inflection of Green Arithmetic. Rather, the Capitalocene signifies capitalism as a way of organizing nature—as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world-ecology. I will try to use the word sparingly. There have been many other wordplays—Anthrobscene (Parikka 2014), econocene (Norgaard 2013), technocene (Hornborg 2015), misanthropocene (Patel 2013), and perhaps most delightfully, manthropocene (Raworth 2014). All are useful. But none captures the basic historical pattern modern of world history as the “Age of Capital”—and the era of capitalism as a world-ecology of power, capital, and nature.

Models for population health

 Models for Population Health Improvement by Health Care Systems and Partners: Tensions and Promise on the Path Upstream

The Roundtable on Population Health Improvement of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine hosted a public workshop on September 19, 2019 titled Models for Population Health Improvement by Health Care Systems and Partners: Tensions and Promise on the Path Upstream. The term upstream refers to the higher levels of action to improve health. Medical services act downstream (i.e., at the patient level) in improving population health, while such activities as screening and referring to social and human services (e.g., for housing, food assistance) are situated midstream, and the work of changing laws, policies, and regulations (e.g., toward affordable housing, expanding healthy food access) to improve the community conditions for health represents upstream action.

The workshop explored the growing attention on population health, from health care delivery and health insurance organizations to the social determinants of health and their individual-level manifestation as health-related social needs, such as patients' needs. The workshop showcased collaborative population health improvement efforts, each of which included one or more health systems. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

A quantum leap on microfluidics for in vitro diagnostics

 On the Wireless Microwave Sensing of Bacterial Membrane Potential in Microfluidic-Actuated Platforms

You may remember my posts on Theranos, the company that wanted to solve in vitro diagnostics (IVD) with a drop of blood. The underlying technology was microfluidics, however at that stage was inmature, and finally Theranos was a massive fraud and Elizabeth Holmes is right now on trial.

Now you can read an interesting article in Sensors journal that tries to combine microfluidics and wireless technologies for detecting bacteria. Microfluidics is defined as the manipulation of a fluid in micrometer-sized structures or channels. In such microchannels, the behavior of a liquid is significantly different than at the macroscale. Surface effects and viscosity start to dominate and flows such as laminar flows are more predictable.

If this procedure finally works in practice, it would represent a quantum leap on In Vitro Diagnostics. Time will tell us if this is so.

Outperforming CRISPR?

 High-throughput functional variant screens via in vivo production of single-stranded DNA

A new technoique overcomes existing limitations of CRISPR: 

Unlike existing techniques depending on CRISPR-Cas–directed genomic breaks for genome editing, this strategy instead uses single-stranded DNA produced by a retron element for recombineering. This enables libraries of millions of elements to be constructed and offers relaxed design constraints which permit natural DNA or random variation to be used as inputs.

A group of researchers created what they call the "Retron Library Recombineering" (RLR) technique, which could allow scientists to run millions of genetic experiments at the same time. This tool, described in a recent paper in PNAS, employs retrons, which are bacterial DNA segments that undergo reverse transcription to generate single-stranded DNA fragments (ssDNA). RLR produces up to millions of mutations concurrently in bacterial cells and "barcodes" mutant cells, enabling the whole pool to be screened at once. This way large quantities of data can be quickly produced and analyzed.

Planetary health

 Safeguarding human health in the Anthropocene epoch: report of The Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on planetary health

The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene

The Conservation Revolution. Radical Ideas for Saving Nature beyond the Anthropocene

Two key articles and a book on the topic of planetary health.

Our more grounded goal was to distil the main issues at stake in these complex debates, which we argue revolve around two main axes: the human–nature dichotomy and the ecological merits or perils of contemporary capitalism. Both issues are not straightforward, and there can be no straightforward, black-and-white arguments for or against them. Indeed, there is a distinct danger in presenting them this way, as it does not correspond to empirical reality and the nuances of the debate. We therefore need to do justice to the potentially radical natures of these alternative proposals by discussing them in more depth to show in greater detail how and why they are radical and important, yet contain several untenable contradictions.

 

Reforming NHS (once again)

 LSE–Lancet Commission on the future of the NHS: re-laying the foundations for an equitable and efficient health and care service after COVID-19

Any reforms starts with a good diagnosis, therefore it's good to check how inequality indicators differ across countries.

And these are the recommendations:

Recommendation 1: increase investment in the NHS, social care, and public health

Recommendation 2: improve resource management across health and care at national, local, and treatment levels

Recommendation 3: develop a sustainable, skilled, and inclusive health and care workforce to meet changing health and care needs

Recommendation 4: strengthen prevention of disease and disability and preparedness to protect against threats to health

Recommendation 5: improve diagnosis, in circumstances where evidence exists to support early diagnosis, for improved outcomes and reduced inequalities

Recommendation 6: develop the culture, capacity, and capabilities of the NHS and social care to become a national learning health and care system

Recommendation 7: improve integration between health, social care, and public health and across different providers, including the third sector

I

Health behaviors and behavior change (2)

 Reset. An Introduction to Behavior Centered Design

A new book to read.

The BCD behavior challenge model consists of three basic problems (with two tasks for each):

• Create Surprise.

• Get exposure.

• Grab attention.

• Cause Revaluation.

• Alter rewards.

• Modify value.

• Enable Performance.

• Disrupt setting.

• Action selection.

Health behaviors and behavior change

 Behavioral Economics and Public Health

Health behaviors and practices constitute the foundation of good physical and mental health. The leading contributors to the global burden of disease include tobacco smoking, low-quality diets, alcohol abuse, physical inactivity, and obesity. Accordingly, encouraging people to adopt—and maintain—healthy behaviors is a major objective of public health. 

Today I recommend this book and this is what you'll find inside:

Chapter 1: An Introduction to Behavioral Economics and Public Health. Christina A. Roberto and Ichiro Kawachi

Chapter 2: Intertemporal Choices for Health. Justin S. White and William H. Dow

Chapter 3: Maintenance of Healthy Behaviors: Forming and Changing Habits. Dennis Rünger and Wendy Wood

Chapter 4: Emotions and Health Decision-Making: Extending the Appraisal Tendency Framework to Improve Health and Health Care. Rebecca Ferrer, William Klein, Jennifer Lerner, Valerie Reyna, and Dacher Keltner

Chapter 5: Social Norms, Beliefs, and Health. Brent McFerran

Chapter 6: Communicating for action: the importance of memorability and actionability. Jason Riis and Rebecca K. Ratner

Chapter 7:Nudging Individuals Toward Healthier Food Choices with the 4Ps Framework for Behavior Change. Zoë Chance, Ravi Dhar, Michelle Hatzis, and Kim Huskey

Chapter 8: Incentivizing Health Behaviors. Kristina Lewis and Jason Block

Chapter 9: Slim By Design: Moving from Can't to CAN.Brian Wansink

Chapter 10: Applying Behavioural Economics in a Health Policy Context: Dispatches from the front lines. Michael Sanders and Michael Hallsworth

Chapter 11: From Choice Architecture to Policy Infrastructure: Multi-Level Theory and the Political Economy of Health Behaviors. Frederick J. Zimmerman

The profits of opioid addiction epidemic (2)

Empire of Pain. THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE SACKLER DYNASTY

The winner takes it all. And the winner is: the Sackler family. They are not alone, they needed accomplices. CDC says:

In 2019, an average of 38 people died each day from overdoses involving prescription opioids, totaling more than 14,000 deaths.1  While prescription opioids were involved in over 28% of all opioid overdose deaths in 2019, there was a nearly 7% decrease in prescription opioid-involved death rates from 2018 to 2019.

 From 1999–2019, nearly 500,000 people died from an overdose involving any opioid, including prescription and illicit opioids.

This rise in opioid overdose deaths can be outlined in three distinct waves.

The first wave began with increased prescribing of opioids in the 1990s, with overdose deaths involving prescription opioids (natural and semi-synthetic opioids and methadone) increasing since at least 19993.

The second wave began in 2010, with rapid increases in overdose deaths involving heroin4.

The third wave began in 2013, with significant increases in overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids, particularly those involving illicitly manufactured fentanyl5,6,7. The market for illicitly manufactured fentanyl continues to change, and it can be found in combination with heroin, counterfeit pills, and cocaine.

And regarding synthetic opioids, you'll find many details inside this book: "The empire of pain" that explains the largest man-made epidemic nowadays.

 My intention was to tell a different kind of story, however, a saga about three generations of a family dynasty and the ways in which it changed the world, a story about ambition, philanthropy, crime and impunity, the corruption of institutions, power, and greed. As such, there are aspects of the public health crisis that this book gives scant attention to, from the science of addiction to the best strategies for treatment and abatement to the struggles of people living with an opioid use disorder. The issue of pain and appropriate pain management is enormously complex, and while this book is highly critical of the mass marketing of opioids for moderate pain, it does not explore at any length the harder question, which is currently a matter of heated debate, about the long-term therapeutic value of opioids for severe chronic pain. 

Beyond that, somebody should remember that the regulator was and is on vacation...

Highly recommended. 

Bidencare

 Which Way Will Biden Go on Health Care?

David Cutler says in JAMA:

The biggest choice for the Biden administration and Congressional Democrats is whether to continue with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or start the transition to a single-payer system. Continuing with the ACA would involve making the recently enhanced subsidies in the ACA’s marketplaces permanent, enacting a public insurance option, providing stronger incentives for Medicaid expansion in recalcitrant states, and pushing for targeted savings in drug prices and administrative costs. A transition to a single-payer system would begin by lowering the age of eligibility for Medicare to 60 years or perhaps 55 years, possibly expanding benefits in areas such as vision, hearing, and dental care, and allowing Medicare to negotiate with drug companies. These 2 approaches are not incompatible; however, it is unlikely that there will be enough money for both.

Clear message to whom it may concern.

 Hockney