Digital Help for Future Immunization Debate

AMSTERDAM (ANP) – Discussions on the need and the alleged risks of vaccination against diseases are ongoing. The Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences of the Netherlands (KNAW) is holding a symposium in Amsterdam on Monday.

Penitentiaries in the Netherlands were mainly refused by smaller groups for religious reasons. who, for example, think that nature should do its job or assume that the cure is worse than the disease.

There are people who think that one can become autistic at one stroke. Meanwhile, measles in Europe is recovering more and more (even though it almost never happens in the Netherlands). On the other hand, the meningococcal vaccine in our country should no longer be dragged after reports of death.

In Development

Many of the "misconceptions" about the sting are extracted from the Internet. Piek Vossen, professor at the VU University of Amsterdam and one of the symposium speakers, works with a small number of scientists to develop a system allowing the surfer to immediately see who says what about immunization, who believes fighting and what violence, what are the sources and how they relate to each other.

Such software is of course useful for all subjects, but Vossen started with vaccination, because of the clarity of the subject. It is also easy to measure the effects of such a "map in perspective" simply by looking at the vaccination rate.

In the five years

He hopes to have the software within five years, with which you can easily map in perspective of the discussion about vaccination ", because the impurity of many information is great." Many messages against vaccination can be referred to a single source, and the reasoning is reversed so that it springs out sources. The Americans zero people died of measles and these data come from a major health institute, and it is omitted that this is due to vaccination. "

The aim of Monday's symposium is to discover how science and society can draw on a recent article from the European Commission, which advocates for better cooperation against preventable diseases with vaccination. participating in the meeting.