Cash crisis hits disease battle. 24 November 2011Last updated at 12:25 Projects to protect people against diseases including malaria are under threat Efforts to tackle diseases which kill millions each year could be badly affected by a severe shortfall in donations to a worldwide funding body.
The Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria will make no new grants until 2014, and there is a threat to some existing projects. The many roles of the healthcare social media manager. By Nancy Cawley Jean I recently worked on promoting a study by one of our physicians, which involved emergency department staff and how the perception of their roles can impact patient satisfaction.
That got me thinking about the many social media-related roles taken on by healthcare communicators. The Researcher: First, we have to figure out social media and our role in this big digital world. Social media increasingly used to gauge public health. When Marcel Salathé, PhD, and his colleagues wanted to know the public's thoughts about the influenza A(H1N1) vaccine in 2009, they turned to Twitter.
The researchers examined more than 300,000 tweets that mentioned the H1N1 immunization and projected vaccine rates based on Twitter sentiments. Their findings were similar to data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gathered through the more traditional approach of phone surveys. The fact that their findings were similar shows social media can be an accurate tool for health research, said Salathé, lead author of the vaccine study, published Oct. 13 in PLoS Computational Biology. Salathé's study reflects the growing trend among researchers and health officials to use social media to examine public health and improve it.