Lages NC, Debbeler LJ, Blumenschein M, Kollmann J,. Dynamic Risk Perceptions in Times of Avian and Seasonal Influenza Epidemics: A Repeated Cross-Sectional Design. Risk Anal. 2021 Feb 13
Infectious diseases pose a serious threat to humans. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how accurately people perceive these risks. However, accuracy can be operationalized differently depending on the standard of comparison. The present study investigated accuracy in risk perceptions for three infectious diseases (avian influenza, seasonal influenza, common cold) using three different standards for accuracy: Social comparison (self vs. others´ risk perceptions), general problem level (risk perceptions for diseases with varying threat levels), and dynamic problem level (risk perceptions during epidemics/seasons vs. nonepidemic/off-season times). Four online surveys were conducted using a repeated cross-sectional design. Two surveys were conducted during epidemics/seasons of avian influenza, seasonal influenza, and common cold in 2006 (n = 387) and 2016 (n = 370) and two surveys during nonepidemic/off-season times for the three diseases in 2009 (n = 792) during a swine flu outbreak and in 2018 (n = 422) during no outbreak of zoonotic influenza. While on average participants felt less at risk than others, indicating an optimistic bias, risk perceptions matched the magnitude of risk associated with the three infectious diseases. Importantly, a significant three-way interaction indicated dynamic accuracy in risk perceptions: Participants felt more at risk for seasonal influenza and common cold during influenza and cold seasons, compared with off-season times. However, these dynamic increases were more pronounced in the perceived risk for others than for oneself (optimistic bias). The results emphasize the importance of using multiple approaches to assess accuracy of risk perception as they provided different information on how accurately people gauge their risk when facing infectious diseases.
See Also:
Latest articles in those days:
- mRNA vaccines encoding computationally optimized hemagglutinin elicit protective antibodies against future antigenically drifted H1N1 and H3N2 influenza viruses isolated between 2018-2020 10 hours ago
- Clinical Characteristics of 118 Pediatric Patients With Acute Benign Myositis Associated With Influenza A Virus Infection 10 hours ago
- Avian Influenza A Viruses Modulate the Cellular Cytoskeleton during Infection of Mammalian Hosts 10 hours ago
- Seroprevalence of Avian Influenza A(H5N6) Virus Infection, Guangdong Province, China, 2022 2 days ago
- Clinical Presentation, Risk Factors, and Comparison of Laboratory Diagnostics for Seasonal Influenza Virus Among Cambodians From 2007 to 2020 2 days ago
[Go Top] [Close Window]