Objectives:
An effective vaccine to SARS-CoV-2 cannot be successfully deployed if a significant number of people worldwide are unwilling to accept it. We investigated the relationship between trust ...in scientists and medical professionals and perceptions of vaccine safety and effectiveness. We also build on past studies by exploring the relationship between confidence in global health organizations and vaccine hesitancy.
Methods:
We conducted an online survey in seventeen countries/territories across five world regions between May -June 2020. We assessed the relationship between COVID19 vaccine hesitancy, confidence in public health organizations, and trust in key experts and leaders.
Results:
Our findings strongly suggest that confidence in the World Health Organization combined with trust in domestic scientists and healthcare professionals is a strong driver of vaccine acceptance across multiple countries/territories.
Conclusion:
We find that hesitancy is widespread, and uptake would be insufficient to achieve herd immunity. There is widespread confidence in how public health organizations have responded to the current pandemic and this is related to vaccine acceptance. Our results also highlight the important role of trust in health care providers and scientists in reducing COVID19 vaccine hesitancy.
COVID-19 is the most significant global crisis of any of our lifetimes. The numbers have been stupefying, whether of infection and mortality, the scale of public health measures, or the economic ...consequences of shutdown. Coronavirus Politics identifies key threads in the global comparative discussion that continue to shed light on COVID-19 and shape debates about what it means for scholarship in health and comparative politics. Editors Scott L. Greer, Elizabeth J. King, Elize Massard da Fonseca, and André Peralta-Santos bring together over 30 authors versed in politics and the health issues in order to understand the health policy decisions, the public health interventions, the social policy decisions, their interactions, and the reasons. The book’s coverage is global, with a wide range of key and exemplary countries, and contains a mixture of comparative, thematic, and templated country studies. All go beyond reporting and monitoring to develop explanations that draw on the authors' expertise while engaging in structured conversations across the book.
This paper examines how culture impacts upon pedagogic practice in Cambodian primary schools. Acknowledging that there is an increasing homogeneity of ideas focusing on constructivist pedagogical ...approaches as the most effective means of achieving improvements in education quality globally, this study investigates the extent to which the Cambodian Ministry of Education's constructivist pedagogy embedded in its Child Friendly Schools policy was adopted in the schools in this study. Using a case study methodology data were collected, primarily, through student focus groups and interviews with educators in three government primary schools located in different geographical areas. Findings identified that CFS policy not only fails to take into account the local cultural situation but appears to side-line the significance of local forms of pedagogy. To develop teaching and learning in the schools in this study, the findings point to a more nuanced approach that acknowledges and accommodates varied forms of pedagogic practice.
Although HIV infection in the Russian Federation was historically concentrated among marginalized populations (people who inject drugs, sex workers, MSM, and the prison population), recent evidence ...suggests that it has become a more generalized epidemic. The objective of our research was to explore how these trends in HIV prevalence and HIV-related mortality compare across Russia.
We calculated HIV-associated mortality for both male and female individuals in each region (oblast) of the Russian Federation using data from the Russian Fertility and Mortality Database (RusFMD). Using current data on HIV prevalence, we computed the correlation between HIV prevalence and HIV-associated mortality. We also used oblast-level data to examine the associations between HIV prevalence and the risk factors most commonly associated with HIV infection.
Over the past 20 years, the Russian Federation has experienced a rapid increase in HIV-associated mortality in both male and female individuals. Our findings revealed significant heterogeneity, with higher rates of HIV-associated mortality reported in oblasts in the Siberian and Ural Federal Districts. There is a strong correlation (0.8) between HIV-associated mortality and virus prevalence. These findings confirm that there are regional disparities in access and adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART), as indicated by the low correlation (-0.4) between virus prevalence and access to ART coverage. The results from our modeling analysis revealed that, in addition to the factors most commonly associated with this disease (e.g. intravenous drug use), knowledge about sexual transmission of HIV in the general population has a broad impact on its prevalence at the oblast level.
Interventions that reduce HIV prevalence, for example, opioid substitution therapy and needle-sharing programs for people who inject drugs, as well as the increased availability of educational and preventive programs may halt the spread of HIV across the Russian Federation. Similarly, increased access to treatment could help in reducing HIV-related mortality.
COVID-19 has created a ramifying public health, economic, and political crisis throughout many countries in the world. While globally the pandemic is at different stages and far from under control in ...some countries, now is the time for public health researchers and political scientists to start understanding how and why governments responded the way they have, explore how effective these responses appear to be, and what lessons we can draw about effective public health policymaking in preparation of the next wave of COVID-19 or the next infectious disease pandemic. We argue that there will be no way to understand the different responses to COVID-19 and their effects without understanding policy and politics. We propose four key focuses to understand the reasons for COVID-19 responses: social policies to crisis management as well as recovery, regime type (democracy or autocracy), formal political institutions (federalism, presidentialism), and state capacity (control over health care systems and public administration). A research agenda to address the COVID-19 pandemic that takes politics as a serious focus can enable the development of more realistic, sustainable interventions in policies and shape our broader understanding of the politics of public health.
The laboratory mouse is the workhorse of immunology, used as a model of mammalian immune function, but how well immune responses of laboratory mice reflect those of free-living animals is unknown. ...Here we comprehensively characterize serological, cellular and functional immune parameters of wild mice and compare them with laboratory mice, finding that wild mouse cellular immune systems are, comparatively, in a highly activated (primed) state. Associations between immune parameters and infection suggest that high level pathogen exposure drives this activation. Moreover, wild mice have a population of highly activated myeloid cells not present in laboratory mice. By contrast, in vitro cytokine responses to pathogen-associated ligands are generally lower in cells from wild mice, probably reflecting the importance of maintaining immune homeostasis in the face of intense antigenic challenge in the wild. These data provide a comprehensive basis for validating (or not) laboratory mice as a useful and relevant immunological model system.
The HIV epidemic continues to grow in Kazakhstan and HIV stigma remains a major barrier to HIV prevention and treatment in the country. HIV stigma in healthcare setting may also discourage people ...living with HIV (PLHIV) from getting the care needed. Therefore, studying the attitudes of healthcare workers towards PLHIV is important and requires well-constructed measurement tools adapted to the specific cultural context. In our study, we aimed to adapt and re-validate a brief questionnaire on HIV stigma among healthcare workers in Almaty, Kazakhstan. We held focus group discussions to obtain input on an existing questionnaire and surveyed 448 primary healthcare providers to psychometrically evaluate the scale. The final HIV-stigma scale consisted of 15 items, 6 of them measuring negative opinions about PLHIV and the rest assessing stigmatizing health facility policies towards PLHIV. Both HIV-stigma subscales demons6trated adequate psychometric properties (with Cronbach's alpha α = 0.57 for the first and α = 0.86 for the second subscale, and with factor loadings >0.35 within each subscale). High numbers of respondents holding negative attitudes towards PLHIV, detected in this sample (87%; n = 380), may suggest the need for immediate actions addressing HIV stigma in healthcare in Kazakhstan.
The current study examines teachers' differential emotion socialization practices with girls and boys by observing the emotion language of 27 teachers in naturally-occurring classroom interactions ...with 112 toddlers. This study explores the valence of teachers' emotion language, the type of teachers' emotion language, and the relation between teachers' emotion language and toddlers' social emotional competence, all by child gender. Results indicate that teachers use negative emotion language more than they use positive emotion language with boys, and emotion language differed by the type of language (labelling, questioning, explaining, or minimizing) for both genders. Additionally, teachers' minimizing of negative emotions to boys was negatively associated with toddler boys' social emotional competence. The current study offers implications for the ways in which we view, socialize, and measure social emotional competence by child gender.
This article provides a critical re-view of the literature and studies of mindfulness at work. It offers a constructive and sympathetic yet also reflective and critical problematisation of the field. ...The re-view documents and examines the contributions of four different orientations towards mindfulness at work. These are as follows: individual mindfulness, collective mindfulness, individual wisdom and collective wisdom. Drawing on these contributions, the article makes the case for an ‘anti-anti mindfulness’. It argues for the self-critical promotion of mindfulness as a vehicle for extending and promoting the insights of organisational studies.
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