B Acad Nat Med Paris
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B Acad Nat Med Paris · Oct 2022
[Perception of medication risk by the public and role of the media].
Opinion polls regularly show that the vast majority of French people have a positive perception of the efficacy and safety of using medicines, including vaccines. Distrust or hostility towards them is only the fact of a small minority of the population, but active and noisy on social networks and overvalued by the media and public authorities. However, the pandemic due to Covid 19 (SARS-CoV-2) has confirmed to what extent the perception of drug risk by the public is unstable, sometimes irrational, how many and complex the determinants of this perception are and what role as a public resonance, fears play out in the media. ⋯ Promoting the correct perception of drug risk requires recalling both the benefits and the risks linked to action but also those linked to inaction; to clarify institutional messages by making them as factual as possible; to limit the number of public broadcasters to achieve greater consistency in their messages; to have the frankness to sometimes say that we do not know, medicine by nature being practiced in a context of uncertainty. The Academy calls for an ambitious educational policy for young people: training in critical thinking and the acquisition of the basics of drug risk should be introduced from middle school. The Academy also believes that the public is entitled to expect quality-controlled information from the media, away from rumors, by calling on indisputable experts and by favoring objective data over subjective testimonies based on personal experiences.
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B Acad Nat Med Paris · Oct 2022
[Management of the COVID-19 epidemic in the carrier battle group (January - April 2020) by the Armed Forces Epidemiology and Public Health Center].
Faced with the COVID-19 epidemic that occurred within the naval air group and the nuclear aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, the French Armed Forces Epidemiology and Public Health Center (CESPA) carried out an investigation (January - April 2020) whose objectives were: to identify the possible routes of introduction of the virus ; to describe the characteristics of the epidemic and to describe and model the dynamics of the epidemic's spread. ⋯ Despite the control measures taken, an epidemic occurred. The often pauci-symptomatic clinical pictures resulted in a delay in identification. CESPA was able to carry out this epidemiological investigation within a highly constrained timeframe, showing all the interest of its integrated public health model.