Over the past decade, the number of countries reporting falsified (fake, spurious/falsely labeled/counterfeit) medicines and the types and quantities of fraudulent drugs being distributed have increased greatly. The obstacles in combating falsified pharmaceuticals include 1) lack of consensus on definitions, 2) paucity of reliable and scalable technology to detect fakes before they reach patients, 3) poor global and national leadership and accountability systems for combating this scourge, and 4) deficient manufacturing and regulatory challenges, especially in China and India where fake products often originate. The major needs to improve the quality of the world's medicines fall into three main areas: 1) research to develop and compare accurate and affordable tools to identify high-quality drugs at all levels of distribution; 2) an international convention and national legislation to facilitate production and utilization of high-quality drugs and protect all countries from the criminal and the negligent who make, distribute, and sell life-threatening products; and 3) a highly qualified, well-supported international science and public health organization that will establish standards, drug-quality surveillance, and training programs like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Such leadership would give authoritative guidance for countries in cooperation with national medical regulatory agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and international agencies, all of which have an urgent interest and investment in ensuring that patients throughout the world have access to good quality medicines. The organization would also advocate strongly for including targets for achieving good quality medicines in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals.
Although structural factors play a key role in access and uptake of HIV prevention services for adolescent and YKP, further qualitative research is needed to understand and mitigate the drivers of vulnerability and constructed perceptions of risk.
Social media have established a growing prevalence and influence in social change, in political movements, and as vehicles for messages related to crisis. The movement #deleteuber demonstrated this growing trend. Using quantitative content analysis, 2,000 tweets posted on Twitter were analyzed in the 2 weeks following the incident to measure how media framing may impact organizational identity. Findings reveal that users on Twitter largely framed the crisis as political, opinionated, and episodic in nature. Additionally, users most commonly associated the crisis with the organization as a collective rather than with the CEO as an individual responsible for actions prompting the crisis, thus blurring the demarcation between personal and organizational identity in online spaces.
Abstract:Using discourse and network analysis, this research explores a reddit thread concerning an emergency situation in the U.S.V.I. after a 2017 hurricane. In particular, research seeks to gain greater understanding of deliberation and problem-solving behaviour of a crowdsourced, citizen group in response to a disaster. Findings support the use of network analysis and measures of centrality to isolate particularly important actors and contributions in a network. Furthermore, findings also depict seven archetypical roles played by users in the discourse. Further research is needed to understand how the tier structure of the reddit platform influences network structure and behaviour and normalize methods and approaches to conducting network-based research on the platform for consistent and reliable findings across research cases. .
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