6. EUFEP Congress 2020

The highlights of EUFEP 2020

Panic over HPV vaccine in Japan

In 2013, 70% of Japanese girls were vaccinated for HPV to prevent cervical cancer. Today it is less than one percent - despite the vaccine being safe and effective. This dramatic decline is due to misinformation in the media that has unsettled the population. How this situation unfurled will be analyzed by Riko Muranaka in the plenary session of EUFEP 2020. The Japanese scientist was awarded the John Maddox Prize for her fight against Fake Health News in 2017.

Who still trusts vaccinations?

Emilie Karafillakis will elaborate why some people hesitate to vaccinate and how large the mistrust in different countries is. She is a researcher at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and is working on this issue as part of the Vaccine Confidence Project.

Effectively combating fake news

False information has a lot of influence, but we are not helpless. Strategies to effectively invalidate such information are revealed by Philipp Schmid from the University of Erfurt.

This objective is also shared by a number of German-language initiatives that will be presented at EUFEP 2020. The website, medizin-transparent.at, from Danube University Krems, for example, scrutinizes claims from the media and advertisements. Further, the German portal, gesundheitsinformation.de, publishes information on many diseases and how they can be treated effectively. Additionally, medwatch.de exposes untrue healing promise. Finally, through EVI-Box, the Medical University of Graz offers a collection of information brochures for the medical waiting room that are guaranteed to be free from fake news.