Assessing HPV vaccination perceptions with online social media in Italy

Spreading of misinformation on mass media and digital platforms regarding vaccines. A systematic scoping review on stakeholders, policymakers, and sentiments/behavior of Italian consumers

Studies on traditional and social media have found that misinformation about vaccines has been widely spread over the last decade, negatively impacting public opinion and people's willingness to get vaccinated. We reviewed the sentiments of Italian users to define the characteristic of anti-vax and pro-vax contents and defined the strategies to deal with the misinformation. Scopus, MEDLINE/PubMed, Google Scholar (up to page 10), and ISI Web of Knowledge databases were systematically searched. Research articles, brief reports, commentaries, and letters published between January 1, 2010 and March 30, 2022 were included in the search. No-vax or ambiguous contents in Italian mass media are not prevalent compared to neutral and pro-vax content; the communication of no-vax groups is significantly simplified, favoring the understanding of the topics by users. Events related to vaccinations are associated with news coverage by media, search engine consultations, and user reactions on social networks. In this context, the activity of no-vax groups is triggered, and misinformation and fake news spread even further. A multifactorial approach is necessary to manage online user sentiment and use mass and social media as health promotion tools.

Efficient recognition of dynamic user emotions based on deep neural networks

The key issue at this stage is how to mine the large amount of valuable user sentiment information from the massive amount of web text and create a suitable dynamic user text sentiment analysis technique. Hence, this study offers a writing feature abstraction process based on ON-LSTM and attention mechanism to address the problem that syntactic information is ignored in emotional text feature extraction. The study found that the Att-ON-LSTM improved the micro-average F1 value by 2.27% and the macro-average F value by 1.7% compared to the Bi-LSTM model with the added attentivity mechanisms. It is demonstrated that it can perform better extraction of semantic information and hierarchical structure information in emotional text and obtain more comprehensive emotional text features. In addition, the ON-LSTM-LS, a sentiment analysis model based on ON-LSTM and tag semantics, is planned to address the problem that tag semantics is ignored in the process of text sentiment analysis. The experimental consequences exposed that the accuracy of the ON-LSTM and labeled semantic sentiment analysis model on the test set is improved by 0.78% with the addition of labeled word directions compared to the model Att-ON-LSTM without the addition of labeled semantic information. The macro-averaged F1 value improved by 1.04%, which indicates that the sentiment analysis process based on ON-LSTM and tag semantics can effectively perform the text sentiment analysis task and improve the sentiment classification effect to some extent. In conclusion, deep learning models for dynamic user sentiment analysis possess high application capabilities.

Who Is Scared of a Needle? An Exploration of Italian Children's Knowledge and Perceptions About the HPV Vaccine

Receiving the HPV vaccine at a young age before being exposed to the virus is essential to improve HPV-related cancer prevention. In many countries in the world, like Italy, the HPV vaccine is offered free of charges to boys and girls aged 12-14. Despite this incentive, the HPV vaccine uptake in Italy remains low. Several interventions and campaigns have been implemented to educate parents and providers. However, children of 12-14 years old have been left out by prevention and education efforts. This study explored middle school children's knowledge and perceptions of the HPV virus and vaccine with the purpose to identify gaps and misperceptions and provide recommendations to develop educational interventions. A total of nine focus groups were conducted, and discussions were analyzed along with 171 anonymous questions collected from the children. Findings included a lack of knowledge of HPV prevention guidelines, negative emotions associated with both the HPV vaccine and vaccines in general, misperceptions between prevention and care, and the desire to receive specific information.

From the Infection to the Immunotherapy in Cervical Cancer: Can We Stop the Natural Course of the Disease?

Cervical cancer (CC) is the second leading cause of cancer death in women aged 20–39 years. Persistent infection with oncogenic types of human papillomavirus (HPV) represents the most important risk factor for the development of cervical cancer. Three HPVs vaccines are currently on the global market: bivalent, quadrivalent, and nonavalent. The nonavalent vaccine provides protection against almost 90% of HPV-related CC. Despite availability of primary and secondary prevention measures, CC persists as one of the most common cancers among women around the world. Although CC is a largely preventable disease, management of persistent or recurrent CC no longer amenable to control with surgery or radiation therapy has not improved significantly with the progress of modern chemotherapy and disseminated carcinoma of the cervix remains a discouraging clinical entity with a 1-year survival rate between 10% and 15%. Over the last few years, there has been increasing interest in immunotherapy as a strategy to fight tumors. This article focuses on recent discoveries about the HPV vaccine and immunotherapies in the prevention and treatment of CC, highlighting the future view.

Human Papillomavirus Infection and Vaccination: Knowledge, Attitude and Perception among Undergraduate Men and Women Healthcare University Students in Switzerland

Background: Human Papillomavirus is a common sexually transmitted infection, representing the main cause of genital warts and cervical cancer. The objective of this study was to evaluate basic knowledge and beliefs regarding HPV infection and HPV vaccine among undergraduate healthcare men and women students, as well as their attitudes towards HPV vaccine. Methods: Undergraduate women and men (nursing and midwifery curses) attending three Schools of Health Sciences located in Switzerland. A total of 427 women and 223 men have completed the web questionnaire, which included questions on their socio-demographic background and about basic knowledge and attitudes toward the HPV infection and vaccination. Results: Women undergraduate students have a better knowledge of HPV infection than their men counterparts, although there was a significant gap in knowledge of the disease’s mode of transmission and prevention. Among women, 72.6% of respondents reported having received at least one dose of HPV vaccines versus 31.4% for men respondents. Conclusion: The results of this study revealed a poor understanding among undergraduate healthcare men and women students about the HPV infection, its mode of transmission and its prevention. Our findings highlight the need to improve education on HPV for undergraduate healthcare students in order to increase the awareness of the disease.