Health misinformation ‘should be tackled head-on’

[ACCRA] With the world in the grip of a global pandemic, health misinformation has become a matter of life or death. But using audio dramas delivered onWhatsApp要明确解决虚假的问题可以帮助非洲解决这一祸害，study建议。

In the first three months of 2020 alone, nearly 6,000 people were hospitalised because of COVID-19 misinformation, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

研究人员说，尽管越来越多的脆弱性，但在低收入收入国家中，基于循证的对健康问题的循证方法仍然很少疾病。

“ Covid-19 Infodemic非常清楚地表明，错误信息可能非常危险，我们需要大规模解决这个问题。”

Maike Winters，Karolinska Institutet，瑞典

该研究发表在BMJ Global Healthtested the effectiveness of two methods for tackling health misinformation using audio dramas on WhatsApp in Sierra Leone. The first method explicitly mentioned the misinformation and then debunked it, while the second method focused on the facts only without mentioning the misinformation.

“Both methods were successful in reducing the belief in typhoid-related misinformation compared to the control group,” says Maike Winters, coauthor of the study and a research coordinator at the Department of Global Public Health, Karolinska Institutet, Sweden.

“When we compared the two methods to each other, the explicit debunking intervention was on most outcomes (not all) more successful than focusing on the facts only.”

温特斯说：“目前许多国家的卫生当局目前回避解决错误信息，并补充说：“他们通常会坚持事实，因为人们担心通过提及错误信息，它会传播给以前没有听说过的人。”

Researchers randomly selected 776 adults who used WhatsApp into three groups: 246 received four audio drama episodes that discussed misinformation about causes of typhoid and debunked it with facts (group A), 245 received two audio dramas with correct information on what causes typhoid (group B), and 245 received two episodes about breastfeeding (control group).

The research was conducted in 2019, before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Both interventions appeared to improve study participants’ knowledge, the study said, with 67 per cent of participants in group A scoring one or higher versus 66 per cent in group B and 51 per cent in the control group.

温特斯（Winters）解释说，音频戏剧是使用当地社区充分尊重的可信信息来源制作的。例如，戏剧演员来自一个著名的塞拉利昂演员团体，他们扮演医生和护士的角色。

“While the misinformation is specific to Sierra Leone, we think that these building blocks can be used to develop similar interventions in other settings,” Winters explains. “TheCOVID-19infodemic makes it very clear that misinformation can be very dangerous and that we need to tackle this on a large scale.”

Akinwale Oyejoko, a physician and managing director of Jayden Medical Centre, Lagos, Nigeria, tellsscidev.net这些发现表明，如果不受组织选中，误解的信息会如何蓬勃发展，甚至成为规范。

“通过错误信息造成了太多的损害。这是信息时代，信息是赋予授权和奴役的主要武器的年龄。这使我们可以窥视整个卫生部门正在发生的事情。”他说。

根据Oyejoko的说法，非洲健康决策者should “come to terms with the amazing reach of fake news and the immediate and potential disaster it is causing to the people”.

他敦促更多的干预措施揭开对健康的普遍误解，以使公众受到启发，并有权抵抗健康错误的信息。

这件作品由Scidev.net的撒哈拉以南非洲英语桌子制作。