Suchergebnisse

The COVID-19 pandemic has created communication challenges exacerbated by the circulation of misinformation and the politicization of science. The case of hydroxychloroquine is an illustrative example, with the drug being aggressively promoted as a cure even while emerging evidence demonstrated the contrary. This research analyzed how hydroxychloroquine discussions took place on Twitter from 21 to 28 April 2020, a key period in developments around the drug. We collected, in real time, tweets with "hydroxychloroquine" over this period, which resulted in a dataset of nearly one million tweets from over 350,000 Twitter accounts. Our content analysis provides specific details of how hydroxychloroquine was promoted and critiqued, and which accounts were tweeting. Findings showed a highly polarized environment with active bots and conspiracy propagators, where political perspectives dominated the Twittersphere in the place of science-focused discussions.

BACKGROUND: Private umbilical cord blood banking is a for-profit industry in which parents pay to store blood for potential future use. Governments have noted the tendency for private banks to oversell the potential for cord blood use, especially in relation to speculative cell therapies not yet supported by clinical evidence. We assessed the regulatory landscape governing private cord bank marketing in Canada. MAIN BODY: Because the problematic marketing of private cord blood banking for future use often relates to speculative future cell therapies that do not exist and are not being advertised for current clinical use, most private blood bank marketing seems to fall outside Health Canada's regulatory scope. However, this problematic marketing is regulated by the Competition Bureau pursuant to the Competition Act. While representations relating to future hypothetical treatments may not always be subject to the legal requirement for claim substantiation, the law also prohibits individuals and companies from knowingly or recklessly making representations that are "false or misleading in a material respect." A representation is materially false or misleading when it could "influence a consumer's behavior or purchasing decisions," and consumers are likely to be considered to be "credulous and inexperienced" for the purposes of assessing an advertisement's general impression. Because all of the potential benefit of the banking is derived from the potential future use of the biological material for health interventions directed toward the customers and their relatives, and because we know the best available medical evidence indicates a very low probability of utility in this context, we can say with confidence that some private cord blood banking claims are materially misleading. Moreover, to the extent that medical professionals are involved in private bank interactions with customers or hold ownership stakes in private banks, they are subject to professional codes, standards of practice, and potentially fiduciary ...