Greece’s National Public Health Organization (NPHO) is launching a targeted initiative to eliminate the phenomenon of fake news through the establishment of a “Fake News Detection and Response Office for Public Health.”
At the same time, the NPHO plans to pilot health literacy programmes in schools in Athens and Larissa, with the ultimate aim of expanding them throughout Greece.
Source: iefimerida.gr
The NPHO will publish its first weekly newsletter on fake news in December, according to the president of EODY, Christos Hadjichristodoulou, professor of hygiene and epidemiology at the University of Thessaly, in an interview with Praktoreio FM journalist Tania Mantouvalou.
“We start by fighting fake news on vaccines”
Hadjichristodoulou said:
“Misinformation is a very significant problem, which we saw emphatically in the pandemic, in the battle with the COVID vaccines. Yet it continues to this day and indeed affects other vaccines and other parts of prevention. Lately we have been hearing that there is concern about the chlorination of water, or the pasteurisation of milk.
“The problems of misinformation are beginning to spread, but the main target is vaccines, which is what we will focus on at the beginning, because recently there have even been studies that are not correctly interpreted and that are supposed to link vaccines to cancers, which has nothing to do with reality. Then we will expand into other fields, but at this stage vaccines are a priority.”
Hadjichristodoulou said that misinformation texts will be classified into three risk levels. He noted that a similar office has been set up at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), with which the NPHO is cooperating. The process will involve identifying inaccurate texts and their sources and categorising them according to the level of risk they represent, based on the impact of the medium publishing them. The response strategy will be adapted accordingly.
“Because we are not interested in spreading misinformation, we will publish mainly the truth and not the full text of the misinformation, but only the title and the source,” Hadjichristodoulou said. Currently, the team of health and communication professionals who will staff the office is being established, while a digital tool, with the contribution of artificial intelligence, is being developed to identify fake news online. The team will also make use of ready-made responses from European organisations such as the ECDC and the European Medicines Agency (EMEA).
An equally important part of the strategy is public education, with a focus on the younger generation, so that citizens can distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources. In cooperation with the Ministry of Education, the NPHO is developing educational materials, even in the form of games, to launch pilot health literacy programmes. These programmes will launch in schools in Athens and Larissa, with the cooperation of the National University of Athens and the University of Thessaly. The aim is to expand them throughout the country.
“Good use of information and critical thinking”
Although the Office will initially focus on prevention and vaccines, the EODY president stressed the negative role of misinformation in the outbreak of a disease. “Many times [misinformation plays] a negative role, because with all the information on the internet, people sometimes don’t trust doctors. So what do they do? They search and find a piece of information they want to grab hold of, because they want hope and it can delay starting a treatment, or not start it at all. Which can even cost them their own lives,” he warned.
“Today we are in the age of information, which we can find easily and everywhere. What is important for both health professionals and the public is the correct use of information and critical thinking. And as a university teacher, I have to say that this is what we need to teach young doctors,” Hadjichristodoulou said.
