Last data update: Nov 04, 2024. (Total: 48056 publications since 2009)
Records 1-8 (of 8 Records) |
Query Trace: Renfro K[original query] |
---|
Infodemics and vaccine confidence: Protocol for social listening and insight generation to inform action
Kolis J , Brookmeyer K , Chuvileva Y , Voegeli C , Juma S , Ishizumi A , Renfro K , Wilhelm E , Tice H , Fogarty H , Kocer I , Helms J , Verma A . JMIR Public Health Surveill 2024 10 e51909 BACKGROUND: In the fall of 2020, the COVID-19 infodemic began to affect public confidence in and demand for COVID-19 vaccines in the United States. While polls indicated what consumers felt regarding COVID-19 vaccines, they did not provide an understanding of why they felt that way or the social and informational influences that factored into vaccine confidence and uptake. It was essential for us to better understand how information ecosystems were affecting the confidence in and demand for COVID-19 vaccines in the United States. OBJECTIVE: The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) established an Insights Unit within the COVID-19 Response's Vaccine Task Force in January 2021 to assist the agency in acting more swiftly to address the questions, concerns, perceptions, and misinformation that appeared to be affecting uptake of COVID-19 vaccines. We established a novel methodology to rapidly detect and report on trends in vaccine confidence and demand to guide communication efforts and improve programmatic quality in near real time. METHODS: We identified and assessed data sources for inclusion through an informal landscape analysis using a snowball method. Selected data sources provided an expansive look at the information ecosystem of the United States regarding COVID-19 vaccines. The CDC's Vaccinate with Confidence framework and the World Health Organization's behavioral and social drivers for vaccine decision-making framework were selected as guiding principles for interpreting generated insights and their impact. We used qualitative thematic analysis methods and a consensus-building approach to identify prevailing and emerging themes, assess their potential threat to vaccine confidence, and propose actions to increase confidence and demand. RESULTS: As of August 2022, we have produced and distributed 34 reports to >950 recipients within the CDC and externally. State and local health departments, nonprofit organizations, professional associations, and congressional committees have referenced and used the reports for learning about COVID-19 vaccine confidence and demand, developing communication strategies, and demonstrating how the CDC monitored and responded to misinformation. A survey of the reports' end users found that nearly 75% (40/53) of respondents found them "very" or "extremely" relevant and 52% (32/61) used the reports to inform communication strategies. In addition, our methodology underwent continuous process improvement to increase the rigor of the research process, the validity of the findings, and the usability of the reports. CONCLUSIONS: This methodology can serve as a diagnostic technique for rapidly identifying opportunities for public health interventions and prevention. As the methodology itself is adaptable, it could be leveraged and scaled for use in a variety of public health settings. Furthermore, it could be considered beyond acute public health crises to support adherence to guidance and recommendations and could be considered within routine monitoring and surveillance systems. |
Online discussions of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) during COVID-19: Insights from the social media platform Reddit
Renfro KJ , Haderxhanaj LT , Loosier PS , Hogben M , Aral SO . Sex Transm Dis 2023 BACKGROUND: With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, reported rates of chlamydia and gonorrhea dropped and remained low for several months of 2020 as compared to 2019. Additional data are needed to reveal causes of reported rate changes. Here, we analyze STI-related conversations from the online-discussion platform Reddit to gain insight into the role of the pandemic on public experience of STIs in 2020. METHOD: We collected data from Pushshift's and Reddit's application programming interfaces via programs coded in Python. We focused data collection on the 'r/STD' subreddit. Collected submissions contained the term(s) "covid" and/or "coronavirus" and were submitted between 01/01/2020 and 12/31/2020. We collected the title and text of each submission. We used a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm to create a topic model of post content and complemented this approach with key term analysis and qualitative hand-coding. RESULTS: Of the 288 posts collected, 148 were complete and included in analyses. LDA revealed four main topics in the collected posts: narration of sexual experiences, STI testing, crowdsourcing of visual STI diagnoses, and descriptions of STI-related pains and treatments. Hand-coding of COVID-19 mentions revealed pandemic-related anxieties about STI care seeking and experienced delays in and changes to quality of STI care received. CONCLUSIONS: References to COVID-19 and associated mitigation efforts were woven into Reddit posts pertaining to several domains of STI care. These data support the notion that Reddit discussions may represent a valuable source of STI information, standing to corroborate and further contextualize STI survey and surveillance work. |
Strategies adopted by gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men to prevent Monkeypox virus transmission - United States, August 2022
Delaney KP , Sanchez T , Hannah M , Edwards OW , Carpino T , Agnew-Brune C , Renfro K , Kachur R , Carnes N , DiNenno EA , Lansky A , Ethier K , Sullivan P , Baral S , Oster AM . MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2022 71 (35) 1126-30 What is already known about this topic? A global monkeypox outbreak is currently primarily affecting gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men. What is added by this report? In a recent survey of gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men, approximately one half reported reducing their number of sex partners, one-time sexual encounters, and use of dating apps because of the monkeypox outbreak. Receipt of vaccine to protect against monkeypox varied by race, ethnicity, and geography. What are the implications for public health practice? It is essential that public health programs continue to deliver tailored, respectful harm reduction messages that do not create stigma to diverse communities of men who have sex with men. Vaccine programs should prioritize efforts to maximize equitable access. © 2022 Department of Health and Human Services. All rights reserved. |
County-level chlamydia and gonorrhea rates by social vulnerability, United States, 2014-2018
Copen CE , Haderxhanaj LT , Renfro KJ , Loosier PS . Sex Transm Dis 2022 49 (12) 822-825 We examined mean chlamydia and gonorrhea case rates from 2014-2018 by categorizing U.S counties by social vulnerability. Overall, these rates were approximately 1.0 to 2.4 times higher in high vulnerability counties than low vulnerability counties. Percentage change in case rates from low to high social vulnerability counties varied by sex, geographic region, and urbanicity. |
Effect of incandescent light on collection of West Nile virus vectors using CDC miniature light traps in northern Colorado
Boze BGV , Renfro K , Markowski D , Lozano-Fuentes S . J Insect Sci 2021 21 (5) To evaluate whether the presence of clear incandescent light was attractive or refractive to host-seeking mosquitoes in northern Colorado, a Bayesian hierarchical model was created to measure differences in trap effectiveness based on presence or absence of phototactic cues. A total of eight CDC miniature light traps (with and without light) were set weekly across four locations in northern Colorado between Weeks 23 and 32 of year 2020. Culex mosquitoes (Diptera: Culicidae) accounted for 81% of all collections in this study with two vectors of West Nile virus being represented. The probability of catching both Culex tarsalis Coquillett and Culex pipiens Linnaeus was reduced when traps were equipped with light, but the difference was not statistically significant for Culex tarsalis. The clear reduction in the number of Culex pipiens caught when these traps were equipped with light indicates negative phototactic behavior and underestimation with current surveillance strategies. Removal of light from these traps may aid our understanding of these species' distribution within the environment, improve collection efficiency, and help guide implementation of targeted control measures used in public health mosquito control. |
Reddit on PrEP: Posts about pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV from Reddit users, 2014-2019
Loosier PS , Renfro K , Carry M , Williams SP , Hogben M , Aral S . AIDS Behav 2021 26 (4) 1084-1094 Social media forums provide a window into how gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men talk about pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV prevention (PrEP) outside of research contexts. To examine information exchange about this important pillar of HIV prevention, discussions around PrEP were collected from the r/askgaybros subreddit of the social media site Reddit (2014-2019). Post titles and asks were qualitatively coded to identify themes describing the primary purpose of the post. In all, 1163 PrEP posts were identified, and a 23.3-fold increase in post volume was seen from 2014 (n = 20) to 2019 (n = 466). The most common post type was a mention of PrEP in a post primarily discussing: an assessment of risk after a sexual encounter (19.2%); a sexual or romantic relationship (6.0%); or other (29.3%). Access challenges (19.1%), information seeking (17.5%), and the cultural effects of PrEP on the gay community (16.3%) were other common themes. Posts regarding the initiation of PrEP (11.8%) and PrEP side-effects (9.4%) were moderately represented. Posts addressing promotion, shade, stigma, and usage were infrequent (≤ 5.5% of posts, respectively). Over time, discussion of PrEP has increased exponentially on r/askgaybros, which may reflect the normalization of PrEP. Qualitative analysis of these posts can be a rich source of data for scientists, practitioners, and healthcare providers interested in increasing uptake of PrEP and decreasing barriers to its use. |
Another step forward in using surveillance for prevention
Hogben M , Renfro KJ . Lancet HIV 2020 7 (7) e453-e454 Two decades ago in the USA, partner services programmes and HIV surveillance programmes frequently had very little cooperation, with guidance typically more focused on limiting sharing of surveillance data with prevention programmes (eg, partner services) than encouraging it.1 Stigma and discrimination experienced by people with HIV, especially those who were members of socially marginalised populations, fuelled reluctance to share surveillance data that identified infected people.2 | | The emergence of antiretroviral therapy (ART), however, changed HIV partner services. The availability of therapy offered the opportunity for public health investigators to not only notify people exposed to HIV and offer testing, but to connect partners infected with HIV with care. In the USA, public health recommendations reflected a change in emphasis towards use of surveillance data to improve programme services and in getting people exposed to HIV notified, evaluated, and linked to care or prevention as needed.3,4 In The Lancet HIV, Chi-Chi N Udeagu and colleagues5 demonstrate the use of HIV partner services in New York City to not only bring newly diagnosed partners to care, but to assess those previously diagnosed and ensure they are either in care and virally suppressed or are relinked to ART services. In doing so, the programme provides a health service to notified people not in care or adequately treated (the individual benefit) and a public health benefit in that returning individuals to care reduces the number of persons in a given population who could plausibly transmit infection. |
Sexual-risk and STI-testing behaviors of a national sample of non-students, two-year, and four-year college students
Renfro KJ , Haderxhanaj L , Coor A , Eastman-Mueller H , Oswalt S , Kachur R , Habel MA , Becasen JS , Dittus PJ . J Am Coll Health 2020 70 (2) 1-8 Objective: To determine whether sexual-risk and STI-testing behaviors differ by college student status.Participants: Sexually experienced 17- to 25-year-olds from a 2013 nationally representative panel survey that evaluated the "Get Yourself Tested" campaign. Non-students (n = 628), 2-yr (n = 319), and 4-yr college students (n = 587) were surveyed.Methods: Bivariate analyses and multiple logistic regression were used.Results: Students were less likely than non-students to have had an early sexual debut and to have not used condoms in their most recent relationship. 4-yr students were less likely than non-students to have had multiple sexual partners. 2-yr students were less likely than non-students to have not used contraception in their most recent relationship.Conclusions: 2-yr and 4-yr college students were less likely than non-students to engage in sexual-risk behaviors. Given potentially greater risk for STI acquisition among non-students, identification and implementation of strategies to increase sexual health education and services among this population is needed. |
- Page last reviewed:Feb 1, 2024
- Page last updated:Nov 04, 2024
- Content source:
- Powered by CDC PHGKB Infrastructure