Below are extracts from a news item of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a comment from me.
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20 January 2025
As misinformation overtakes climate and conflict as the biggest global risk, bold collaborative action is needed to tackle health misinformation
https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2025/lshtm-director-2025-must-be...
Professor Liam Smeeth, the Director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), has warned that vital public health areas such as pandemics, vaccines, climate and health and reproductive health “are at risk of being overwhelmed” by a new surge of health misinformation.
He has urged universities and research institutions around the globe to step up the fight against unprecedented misinformation attacks on public health interventions that, the vast majority of experts agree, save millions of lives each year.
Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information. This can be ‘fake news’ shared deliberately for fun or profit (disinformation) or political ends (propaganda) or shared out of genuine belief.
A new report from The World Economic Forum ranks misinformation and disinformation as the top global risk over the next two years, ahead of both extreme weather and state-based armed conflict.
Professor Smeeth said: “That misinformation and disinformation topped this ranking of global risks should be a wake-up call to institutions around the world that we have to become more agile and effective in our responses to dangerous health misinformation or risk a repeat of the kind of ‘infodemic’ we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic that put lives at risk.”...
LSHTM’s counter-misinformation principles for communications
Decide your threshold...
Choose your audience...
Engage with empathy...
Quarantine the attack...
Demonstrate consensus...
Build trust...
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COMMENT (NPW): The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine is a HIFA Supporting Organisation and they have sponsored a previous HIFA project on child health. I have written to Liam Smeeth to offer HIFA as a discussion platform to help address the issues.
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org