The Lancet Infectious Diseases
May 2013 Volume 13  Number 5  p377 – 464
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/issue/current

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Comment
May 13, 2013
Inoculating communities against vaccine scare stories
Natasha Sarah Crowcroft, Kwame Julius McKenzie
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The biggest threat facing the success of immunisation might be public lack of confidence in vaccines, repeatedly undermined by safety concerns promulgated in social and news media.1 In The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Heidi Larson and colleagues’ study examines how a typology of concerns can be applied within an established global surveillance system, HealthMap, to track and characterise vaccine news stories.2,3 The usefulness of systematically tracking online media stories was first established for disease surveillance through a Canadian project, the Global Public Health Information Network,4 followed by several other systems including HealthMap.