Department of Informatics and Applied Mathematics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, Brazil.
Laboratory of Technological Innovation in Health (LAIS), Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, Brazil.
Front Public Health. 2023 Nov 1;11:1248121. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1248121. eCollection 2023.
To effectively combat the rising incidence of syphilis, the Brazilian Ministry of Health (MoH) created a National Rapid Response to Syphilis with actions aimed at bolstering epidemiological surveillance of acquired, congenital syphilis, and syphilis during pregnancy complemented with communication activities to raise population awareness and to increase uptake of testing that targeted mass media outlets from November 2018 to March 2019 throughout Brazil, and mainly areas with high rates of syphilis. This study analyzes the volume and quality of online news content on syphilis in Brazil between 2015 and 2019 and examines its effect on testing.
The collection and processing of online news were automated by means of a proprietary digital health ecosystem established for the study. We applied text data mining techniques to online news to extract patterns from categories of text. The presence and combination of such categories in collected texts determined the quality of news that were analyzed to classify them as high-, medium-and low-quality news. We examined the correlation between the quality of news and the volume of syphilis testing using Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient.
1,049 web pages were collected using a Google Search API, of which 630 were categorized as earned media. We observed a steady increase in the number of news on syphilis in 2015 ( = 18), 2016 ( = 26), and 2017 ( = 42), with a substantial rise in the number of news in 2018 ( = 107) and 2019 ( = 437), although the relative proportion of high-quality news remained consistently high (77.6 and 70.5% respectively) and in line with similar years. We found a correlation between news quality and syphilis testing performed in primary health care with an increase of 82.32, 78.13, and 73.20%, respectively, in the three types of treponemal tests used to confirm an infection.
Effective communication strategies that lead to dissemination of high quality of information are important to increase uptake of public health policy actions.
为了有效应对梅毒发病率的上升，巴西卫生部（MoH）创建了国家梅毒快速反应计划，该计划采取了行动，旨在加强获得性、先天性梅毒和妊娠梅毒的流行病学监测，并辅以宣传活动，提高公众意识，并增加针对大众媒体的检测，该计划从 2018 年 11 月至 2019 年 3 月在巴西各地展开，主要在梅毒发病率较高的地区。本研究分析了 2015 年至 2019 年巴西网络上有关梅毒的新闻内容的数量和质量，并研究了其对检测的影响。
通过为该研究建立的专有数字健康生态系统，实现了对网络新闻的自动采集和处理。我们应用文本数据挖掘技术从文本类别中提取模式。收集的文本中存在和组合这些类别决定了新闻的质量，对其进行分析以将其分类为高质量、中质量和低质量新闻。我们使用 Spearman 秩相关系数检查了新闻质量与梅毒检测数量之间的相关性。
使用 Google Search API 共收集了 1049 个网页，其中 630 个被归类为有偿媒体。我们观察到 2015 年（ = 18）、2016 年（ = 26）和 2017 年（ = 42）有关梅毒的新闻数量稳步增加，2018 年（ = 107）和 2019 年（ = 437）新闻数量大幅增加，尽管高质量新闻的相对比例一直保持较高水平（分别为 77.6%和 70.5%），与类似年份一致。我们发现新闻质量与初级保健中进行的梅毒检测之间存在相关性，用于确认感染的三种梅毒螺旋体检测的检测量分别增加了 82.32%、78.13%和 73.20%。
有效的沟通策略对于传播高质量信息对于增加公共卫生政策措施的采用至关重要。
