Unofficial Sources Research Articles

COVID-19 information disorder: six types of harmful information during the pandemic in Europe

The outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease COVID-19 propelled the creation, transmission, and consumption of false information – unverified claims, misleading statements, false rumours, conspiracy theories, and so on – all around the world. When various official or unofficial sources issue erroneous, misleading or contradicting information during a crisis, people who are exposed to this may behave in ways that cause harm to the health and well-being of themselves or others, e.g., by not taking appropriate risk reducing measures or blaming or harassing vulnerable groups. To work towards a typology of informational content that may increase people’s vulnerability in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, we explored 98 instances of potentially harmful information that spread in six European countries – France, Italy, Norway, Finland, Lithuania, and Estonia – between March and May 2020. We suggest that during the pandemic, exposure to harmful information may have made people more vulnerable in six ways: (1) by discouraging appropriate protective actions against catching/spreading the virus, (2) by promoting the use of false (or harmful) remedies against the virus, (3) by misrepresenting the transmission mechanisms of the virus, (4) by downplaying the risks related to the pandemic, (5) by tricking people into buying fake protection against the virus or into revealing their confidential information, and (6) by victimising the alleged spreaders of the virus by harassment/hate speech. The proposed typology can be used to guide the development of risk communication plans to address each of these information-related vulnerabilities.

“Everything Has Changed, and Nothing Has Changed in Journalism”: Revisiting Journalistic Sourcing Practices and Verification Techniques during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and Beyond

Using the Egyptian Revolution as a case study, this article studies journalistic sourcing and verification through in-depth interviews with journalists in the United Kingdom. While the coverage of the event in the British media was dominated by civic, unofficial sources, interviews conducted in 2014 revealed that journalists only included these if no other sources were available. In fact, journalists voiced concern with regards to verification of online sources, and rarely included these as direct, first-hand accounts. Follow-up interviews conducted in 2020 point to developments journalism practice has undergone since, particularly in relation to open-source content verification. Overall, the picture we paint of British journalists’ handling of content sourced from social media is one wedged between expressed enthusiasm and cautious scepticism.

World Health Organization and COVID-19 Pandemic: Assessing Effectiveness of Global Governance

Introduction. The central role in the formation of a global health governance system is assigned to the World Health Organization (WHO), which is part of the United Nations Family of Organizations. Amid increasing globalization, the challenges to human security have become more acute, including those related to the spread of dangerous infections, which grow to epidemics and pandemics. Faced with the COVID-2019 pandemic, WHO appears to have a number of structural problems that prevent it from successfully fulfilling its regulatory and coordinating functions. Materials and methods . Methodologically, the study is based on a critical analysis of relevant official and unofficial sources, as well as functional and chronological methods. Results. The article examines how WHO has been responding to the pandemic, what objective and subjective problems it is facing, what “failures" it has experienced and how they can be overcome through further reforms. It is concluded that despite the presence of, albeit limited, experience in combating mass infections, over the last decades WHO has failed to carry out the necessary structural reforms aimed at improving the effectiveness of the organization. The authors study how these “failures" affect the Organization's reputation, as well as what consequences that might lead to. Discussion and conclusion . WHO remains the key institution entrusted with the function to develop a global health governance system. At the same time, the Organization's relations with national states, its “disconnection" of national healthcare complexes, financing and accountability problems, as well as the ineffectiveness of the coordinating function result in its deteriorating role. Amid globalization, this factor contributes to the weakening international security, since the lack of effective pandemic management exacerbates the problems of national stability and human security.

Rurality, landscaping, tourism and sustainable development

The "2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development" identifies 17 Objectives SDGs (UN 2015) that implicitly formulate a j’accuse of the current model of world growth and evolution from an environmental, economic and social point of view, overcoming the idea that sustainability is only an environmental issue. The 169 goals that the signatory countries have committed themselves to achieve by 2030 constitute an integrated vision of the different dimensions of development (UN 2017). Furthermore, according to some recent researches and opinions, we must look to the past of the spontaneous rural pre-industrial villages to write a future in which some of the signs and values present in them as perennial and lasting heritage could be used to regulate the management of the economy and territories (Berti et al. 2010). A legacy that emerges in a deeply diversified way in landscape and in the territory (Schlögel, 2009) in which the plurimillennial time of biophysical processes has produced differences in exposure to the sun, winds, humidity, temperature, vegetation, species, and where the secular time of anthropic processes produced stratification of signs, senses, cultures, "an attraction for the permanent settlement of the most varied ethnic groups and a conservation and regeneration of their cultures, the diversity of languages, attitudes, food, music and gestures" (Barca, 2018). To get to the time of the "narrated history", according to the definition given by the historian Le Goff, dominated by the "infinitely human" (Le Goff,1982), whose experience leaves its traces in unofficial sources. In this history, time and culture are not idealistic and disenchanted Geist of an era, but they translate into storytelling, myth, story, and the architecture and the built environment contain dreams and hopes produced by the encounter-clash between the individual and collectivity, between subordinate and dominant classes.

PAM Clustering Aided Android Malicious Apps Detection

The exponential growth of android contrivances has attracted cybercriminals strongly and dramatically. The applications existed in the android market represented an attack surface owing to the lack of security mechanisms applied by the Google play store. Additionally, downloading apps from unofficial sources lead to a further security threat. Any mobile application requests several permissions to access users’ data to run the app. Thus, attackers exploited this feature in compromising users’ sensitive data. This motivated several researchers to investigate security mechanisms to detect Android malware based on this feature utilizing machine learning techniques, particularly classification techniques. However, This research proposes a permission-based android malware detection framework using a clustering algorithm. Further motivation for this research is that large datasets labeling is a tough mission. Therefore, Our work will contribute to android malware detection as well as android apps datasets labeling. PAM (Partitioning Around Medoid) clustering has been exploited for this purpose since its less affected by outliers or other extreme values. The most significant features have been selected as an input to the clustering algorithm to enhance its results. The results depicted that our clustering algorithm was able from grouping our dataset into two categories malevolent and genuine apps. Moreover, our result has been validated by evaluation standard F-Measure, which is counting for 0.86 for 40 attributes subset, while it is 0.88 for 30 features subset. This reveals a good performance level of permission-based android malware detection and android applications datasets labeling into malware and good ware.

Heterogeneous Risk Perception amid the Outbreak of COVID-19 in China: Implications for Economic Confidence.

The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has elicited concerns about public fear and economic fallout. The current study takes a person-oriented approach to identify the unique response patterns that underlie three risk perception components (likelihood, severity, and protection efficacy) of COVID-19, with information sources as precursors and economic confidence as outcomes. A total of 1,074 Chinese citizens participated in a national online survey in early February 2020. A latent profile analysis showed that participants exhibited one of three classes: Risk Neutrals (49.9%; moderate in all components), Risk Deniers (14.3%; low likelihood, low severity, and high protection efficacy), or Risk Exaggerators (35.8%; high likelihood, high severity, and low protection efficacy). Subsequent analyses showed that reliance on unofficial sources (gossip and news spread among friends; WeChat) positively correlated with membership in the Risk Exaggerators class. In turn, belonging in the Risk Exaggerators class correlated with the lowest short-term (but not long-term) economic confidence. This study suggests that exploring the heterogeneity of the public risk perception might help the government to design differentiated risk communication strategies during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Create a tool to help students make better‐informed academic decisions

When resources like Rate My Professor are available, students are going to use them. But how do you deal with the fact that these unofficial sources often provide them with inaccurate and false information about course options?

'It's just basically a box full of disease'-navigating sterile syringe scarcity in a rural New England state.

Injection drug use has increased in non-urban communities in the United States where sterile syringe access is limited. This study aimed to characterize how people who inject drugs in a predominantly rural state navigate syringe scarcity. Qualitative study. New Hampshire (NH), USA. At the time of our study, syringe services programs were illegal in NH but pharmacies could sell ≤10 syringes without prescription. Twenty people aged ≥18years who injected at least once in the past 30days were recruited through provider referral, street-based recruitment and snowball sampling. Semi-structured interview guide. Verbatim transcripts were coded based on interview guide constructs and emergent themes. Analysis focused on pharmacy syringe access, unofficial syringe sources and related impacts on syringe sharing and reuse FINDINGS: Participants could identify no local pharmacies that sold syringes without prescription. Pharmacy purchase in neighboring counties, or across state lines, required private transportation and this, along with purchaser identification requirements, presented substantial access barriers. Interstate travel also exposed participants to vigilant policing of interstate highways and potential criminal justice involvement. Many participants thus resorted to informal syringe sources closer to home including purchasing syringes on the street, using discarded syringes, breaking into biohazard containers and constructing improvised syringes out of salvaged syringe parts, metals and plastics. Repeated re-use of syringes until they were no longer operational was common. Overall, syringe scarcity gave participants few options but to engage in syringe sharing and re-use, putting them at risk of serious injection-related infections. Limited sterile syringe access contributes to an environment in which people who inject drugs report that they are less able to refrain from risky injection practices.

Cooperativismo de vivienda por ayuda mutua Formación, experiencia y lucha en Uruguay

Gender perspective on suicides helps to understand the higher male rate and the suicide of femicides, including of the members of security forces. These phenomena, and the preference and easy access to guns, could be explained by the mandate of hegemonic masculinity. To study this in the Argentine case, statistical analysis of secondary data from official and unofficial sources was conducted. Results suggest that in order to reduce the level of suicides and femicides, including those committed by policemen, strategies should combine disarmament and gender perspectives, by reducing the access to guns and by questioning the hegemonic masculine identity that legitimizes and motivates guns’ ossession and gender violence.

News sections, journalists and information sources in the journalistic coverage of crises and emergencies in Spain

Media social responsibility is rarely more evident than in the news coverage of a crisis, disaster or emergency. This research analyses the use of and trust in information sources through a nationwide survey of 30 editors-in-chief of Spain’s most relevant newspapers, radio, television and online media outlets (N=30). With a very high response rate (76.66%), the findings confirm that the use of unofficial sources (victims and those affected) are prioritized over official government sources. It is significant that the inferential analysis reveals that the editors give the same credibility as a source of information to the government as it does to the victims in the current context of misinformation, fake news and hoaxes. It is concluded that newsmaking should be built on the balanced use of official and unofficial sources. The results also confirm that the entire newsroom participates in this coverage and no journalistic specialization is detected amongst reporters.

Spatial dark figures of rapes: (In)Consistencies across police and hospital data

The dark figures of crime are occurrences that, by some criteria, are called crime yet that are not registered in the official statistics. According to several studies, only a few rapes are reported to the authorities. The current study, using crime data from Campinas, Brazil, sought to examine the spatial dark figures of rapes through the comparison between the spatial patterns of incidents from an official source (police) and the spatial patterns of incidents from an unofficial source (hospital). We used Kernel density estimation maps, generalized Gini coefficient, and a spatial point patterns test to measure the spatial dissimilarities between both sources. Also, we estimated the likelihood of spatial dark figures of rapes using logistic regression models. The results indicate patterns of spatial dark figures of rapes and its association with the street segment and the neighborhood factors. The findings suggest the potential for partnerships between police and medical services in targeting locations with high levels of rape underreport. In addition, it supports place-based prevention measures.

PADI-web: A multilingual event-based surveillance system for monitoring animal infectious diseases

Global animal disease outbreak detection and monitoring rely on official sources, such as intergovernmental organisations, as well as digital media and other unofficial outlets. Manually extracting relevant information from unofficial sources is time-consuming. The Platform for Automated extraction of animal Disease Information from the web (PADI-web) is an automated biosurveillance system devoted to online news source monitoring for the detection of emerging/new animal infectious diseases by the French Epidemic Intelligence System. The tool automatically collects news via customised multilingual queries, classifies them and extracts epidemiological information. We detail each step of the PADI-web pipeline, with a focus on the new user-oriented features.

Приверженность врачей-педиатров иммунопрофилактике инфекционных болезней: современное состояние проблемы

In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) for the first time included refusal of vaccination in the list of ten global threats to humanity, since a decrease in vaccination coverage can trigger breakouts of many preventable infectious diseases. Aim: to clarify the causes for insufficient doctors’ adherence to immunoprophylaxis of infectious diseases and to develop measures for eliminating these causes. Patients and Methods: an open pilot online survey of 175 pediatricians working in medical institutions of the Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug–Yugra (KMAO-Yugra) was conducted. The questionnaire contained 14 questions about the respondents’ attitude to various aspects of vaccinal prevention, as well as the level of respondent training on this topic. At the same time, a point scale was used to evaluate the provisions offered to the respondent for analysis (the minimum score is 0 points, the maximum score is 5 points). Results: 71–76% of respondents were convinced of the vaccination efficacy and safety. The main reasons for the lack of adherence to immunoprophylaxis of infectious diseases among the surveyed pediatricians were the insufficient level of knowledge due to the lack of continuous medical education on vaccinal prevention during the entire period of professional activity (25% of hospital-based physicians, 20% of doctors of educational institutions, 16% of health officials and 9% of general practitioners) and the use of information obtained from unofficial sources presented in the global Internet (25% of respondents). The study found that 13% of the physicians surveyed were not familiar with the recommendations for vaccination of pregnant women against influenza, and 24% were not informed about the possibilities, efficacy and safety of pregnant women vaccination against pertussis. Methods to increase the pediatricians’ adherence level to vaccination are outlined, the key among which is mandatory periodic professional development in immunoprophylaxis of infectious diseases in the system of continuing professional education. Conclusion: almost every fifth pediatrician of the KMAO-Yugra surveyed has an insufficient adherence level to immunoprophylaxis of infectious diseases. The article outlines the methods to increase the pediatricians’ adherence level to vaccination. KEYWORDS: vaccination, pediatrician, immunoprophylaxis, continuing professional education, vaccination coverage, continuing education, adherence to vaccination. FOR CITATION: Girina A.A., Petrovski F.I., Zaplatnikov A.L. Pediatricians adherence to immunoprophylaxis of infectious diseases: current state of the problem. Russian Journal of Woman and Child Health. 2020;3(4):290–294. DOI: 10.32364/2618-8430-2020-3-4-290-294.

Monitoring emergency calls and social networks for COVID-19 surveillance. To learn for the future: The outbreak experience of the Lombardia region in Italy.

On 18th February the first Italian case of Coronavirus Induced Disease 2019 (COVID19) due to secondary transmission outside China was identified in Codogno, Lombardia region. In the following days the number of cases started to rise not only in Lombardia but also in other Italian regions, although Lombardia remained and it is still the most affected region in Italy. At the moment, 234801 cases have been identified in Italy, out of which 90070 in Lombardia region. The (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2) SARS CoV 2 outbreak in Italy has been characterized by a massive spread of news coming from both official and unofficial sources leading what has been defined as infodemia, an over-abundance of information – some accurate and some not – that has made hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance needed. Infodemia on SARS CoV 2 created the perfect field to build uncertainty in the population, which was scared and not prepared to face this outbreak. It is understandable how the rapid increase of the cases’ number , the massive spread of news and the adoption of laws to face this outbreak led to a feeling of anxiety in the population whose everyday life changed very quickly. A way to assess the dynamic burden of social anxiety is a context analysis of major social networks activities over the Internet. To this aim Twitter represents a possible ideal tool since the focused role of the tweets according to the more urgent needs of information and communication rather than general aspects of social projection and debate as in the case of Facebook, which could provide slower responses for the fast individual and social context evolution dynamics. Aim of the paper is to analyse the most common reasons for calling and outcomes. Furthermore, the joint analysis with Twitter trends related to emergency services might be useful to understand possible correlations with epidemic trends and predict new outbreaks. (www.actabiomedica.it)

Picturing the West – A Slideshow of a Private Production in Communist Romania

The purpose of this paper is to present and analyse the biography of a passionate 20th century Romanian tourist who lived in Bucharest and travelled across Europe, bringing his (subjective) travel experiences of Western countries to private and public audiences curious about the unknown “abroad” during the 1980s. This case study is about the life and travel experiences of Vasile A. Marinescu, and deals with their visibility and interpretation during the communist era. The research is based on unpublished sources – visual and audio sources, as well as manuscripts (between 1970 and 1980), interviews – and other already published archive materials. The research describes, in particular, how the West was perceived and presented in those semi-private shows, and how (and which of) those unofficial sources influenced the imagination of Romanians, aside the official propaganda.

Shopping for schools: parents of students with disabilities in the education marketplace in Stockholm

ABSTRACT This article examines the experiences of parents of students with disabilities when they shop for schools in Stockholm. It looks at the motivations behind school choice, the kinds and sources of information used and the constraints that parents encounter in the school choice process. The results, based on interviews with parents, demonstrate friendship, special support systems and school flexibility as reasons for opting for a particular school. Parents seek school-based and consumer satisfaction information, through the use of both official and unofficial sources. Parents also describe constraints such as lack of choice, information inadequacy and lack of support. The findings of this study suggest some negative implications on inclusion and equity and consumer empowerment for students with disabilities.

Donosy w Kancelarii Gubernatora Lubelskiego w ostatnich dekadach XIX w.

In its task of controlling the local population, the local Russian administration in the Kingdom of Poland gathered information from both official and unofficial sources. An important source, from the point of view of the Russian authorities, was denunciations. They provided information about various individuals and phenomena occurring outside the knowledge of the administrative apparatus. The denunciations finding their way into the hands of the Governor of Lublin concerned many issues of everyday life, from the functioning of state administration and its functionaries to crime and morality. Many of them were not left without some sort of response from the authorities — sometimes this was the way in which citizens drew the authorities’ attention to their problems, grievances etc., including those caused by representatives of the state administration.

EpidNews: Extracting, exploring and annotating news for monitoring animal diseases

In the recent years, there has been a massive increase in the amount of data published on the web about human and animal health events. Epidemiologists use this spatio-temporal information on a daily basis to detect and monitor disease outbreaks over time. While official sources such as the World Organization for Animal Health release formal outbreak notifications, unofficial sources such as online newspapers contain unstructured information with different levels of reliability. Manually retrieving the data from a website like Google News and then deriving sensible insights from the huge dataset takes a lot of time and effort. We present EpidNews, a new visual analytics tool that helps to visualize and explore epidemiological data for monitoring animal disease outbreaks. The tool uses several views depicting various levels of abstraction, which helps fulfill almost all the data analysis requirements of epidemiologists. EpidNews allows to visualize and compare data from both official and unofficial sources. We also present the use case of an epidemiology expert, wherein the expert assesses the usability and productivity of EpidNews by using the tool in her daily work.

Parental attitude toward children's mental disorders and its relationship with help seeking behaviors.

Background The purpose of the study was to assess parent's attitudes toward mental illness in children and its relationship with help seeking behaviors. Method This cross-sectional study was conducted in a pediatric psychiatric clinic of under affiliation of Tehran University of Medical Sciences in 2016-2017. All children's parents or guardians who referred for the first time to the clinics were the study population. Convenient sampling was applied and 400 subjects were included by survey method. The data collection tool for this study included a form for demographic data, a questionnaire for assessing parents' attitude toward the causes, behavioral demonstrations and treatment of mental disorders in children, and finally a checklist to determine help seeking behaviors. Descriptive and inferential statistics was applied with SPSS software version 16 for data analysis. Results Of the parents, 93.7% had a good attitude toward mental illness in the three studied realms. Of the parents, 56.25% referred to official sources of help. The results of this research showed that there was a significant difference between the mean scores of parents' attitude (sum of the three areas) in terms of child's gender, parents' marital status, father's job, father's education, and mother's education and there was a significant relationship between help seeking behavior of parents just with fathers' education level (p<0.05). Conclusions The results showed that parents had a good attitude toward their children's mental disorders. However, it should not be overlooked that nearly half of the parents were still referring to unofficial sources of assistance.

The Nigerian Civil War and the ‘Italian’ Oil Workers

The Nigeria-Biafra War, 1967–1970, had significant international dimensions. On 7 May 1969, eleven employees of the Italian-run AGIP oil company were killed at Kwale while eighteen others were held prisoner by Biafran soldiers. The death penalty given to the surviving oil workers by the Biafran government had a damaging effect on Biafra’s international image and temporarily weakened European sympathy for Biafra. Unofficial sources later accused Biafrans of collecting a ransom in exchange for the release of the oil workers. Using previously underutilised archival materials in Britain, Canada and the USA, this paper argues that Biafra rather attempted to use the foreign workers to secure de facto recognition, a move that ended in a fiasco.