Publications by authors named "Barbara Lanfranchi"
Article Synopsis
- - Slovenia has requested recognition from the European Commission as having a negligible risk of classical scrapie, supported by testing a significant number of sheep and goats from 2016 to 2022.
- - The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) is evaluating if Slovenia's testing protocols provide enough confidence (95%) to detect the disease at low prevalence levels, utilizing advanced modeling techniques.
- - The assessment indicates that Slovenia has met testing requirements over the years, ensuring effective disease detection, with plans to maintain these standards, assuming satisfactory test sensitivity levels.
The European Commission requested an estimation of the BSE risk (C-, L- and H-BSE) from gelatine and collagen derived from ovine, caprine or bovine bones, and produced in accordance with Regulation (EC) No 853/2004, or Regulation (EC) No 1069/2009 and its implementing Regulation (EU) No 142/2011. A quantitative risk assessment was developed to estimate the BSE infectivity, measured in cattle oral infectious dose 50 (CoID), in a small size batch of gelatine including one BSE-infected bovine or ovine animal at the clinical stage. The model was built on a scenario where all ruminant bones could be used for the production of gelatine and high-infectivity tissues remained attached to the skull (brain) and vertebral column (spinal cord).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSelecting appropriate diagnostic methods that take account of the type of vaccine used is important when implementing a vaccination programme against highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). If vaccination is effective, a decreased viral load is expected in the samples used for diagnosis, making molecular methods with high sensitivity the best choice. Although serological methods can be reasonably sensitive, they may produce results that are difficult to interpret.
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- TikTok gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to an analysis of vaccine-related videos on the platform, focusing on both high-engagement content and those from vaccine skeptics.
- Researchers analyzed 754 Top Videos and 180 Vaccine Sceptics' videos from January 2020 to March 2021, revealing that the majority of Top Videos (40.5%) supported vaccines, while over 95% of skeptic videos were discouraging.
- The study found that vaccine promotion often came from healthcare professionals, with common themes including herd immunity; meanwhile, skeptic videos tended to focus on conspiracy theories and personal freedom, indicating a potential lower level of affective polarization on TikTok compared to other platforms.
Article Synopsis
- Social media posts are used to share opinions about vaccines, and a special computer program can quickly analyze these opinions in tweets from Italy.
- The analysis involved collecting tweets between 2019 and 2021 and sorting them into three groups: positive, neutral, and negative about vaccines.
- The best computer model to understand these tweets achieved about 72.8% accuracy on one set, but it needed to be updated to better understand changes in language over time, improving accuracy when retrained with new data.
In the context of the European Joint Action on Vaccination, we analyzed, through quantitative and qualitative methods, a random sample of vaccine-related tweets published in Italy between November 2019 and June 2020, with the aim of understanding how the Twitter conversation on vaccines changed during the first phase of the pandemic, compared to the pre-pandemic months. Tweets were analyzed by a multidisciplinary team in terms of kind of vaccine, vaccine stance, tone of voice, population target, mentioned source of information. Multiple correspondence analysis was used to identify variables associated with vaccine stance.
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