Cancer presents a significant public health challenge in China, necessitating broad collaboration across society. The Chinese government has articulated a goal to increase the overall five-year survival rate for cancer by 15% by 2030. Achieving this objective requires not only advances in medical technology, but also an improvement in the dissemination of knowledge pertaining to cancer prevention and treatment.

To provide a comprehensive understanding of the status of cancer prevention and level of popularization in China in 2023.

From January 2023 to May 2023, online questionnaires were distributed to 3000 participants, including medical personnel, patients with cancer, their families, and the general public. There were 2711 valid responses, covering the entire nation.

A total of 1020 medical personnel and 1691 patients with cancer, their family members, and the general public participated in the survey. Among medical personnel, 93.2% had popularized cancer health. Commonly addressed topics included cancer prevention (85.9%) and cancer screening (77.8%). Primary challenges included time constraints (73.9%), insufficient personnel and material support (66.7%), and uncertainty as to where to begin (49.3%). Among patients with cancer, their family members, and the general public, 93.4% reported reading or watching cancer science popularization materials and 56.9% expressed a desire for deeper understanding. The most sought-after topics in cancer science popularization included cancer screening (80.2%) and cancer prevention (75.8%). The greatest challenge encountered in accessing cancer health popularization was an abundance of misinformation (67.5%).

Most clinical doctors, patients, family, and the general public wish to participate in cancer education. However, improvement in the quality of content in cancer prevention and treatment education is required.

• Cancer health popularization
• Patient education
• Science popularization
• Cancer prevention

• fake news
• individual differences
• news sharing
• news sharing platform
• social media

This qualitative research study, a critical content analysis, explores Canadian media reporting of childhood in Canada during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Popular media plays an important role in representing and perpetuating the dominant social discourse in highly literate societies. In Canadian media, the effects of the pandemic on children and adolescents’ health and wellbeing are overshadowed by discussions of the potential risk they pose to adults. The results of this empirical research highlight how young people in Canada have been uniquely impacted by the COVID-19 global pandemic. Two dominant narratives emerged from the data: children were presented “as a risk” to vulnerable persons and older adults and “at risk” of adverse health outcomes from contracting COVID-19 and from pandemic lockdown restrictions. This reflects how childhood was constructed in Canadian society during the pandemic, particularly how children’s experiences are described in relation to adults. Throughout the pandemic, media reports emphasized the role of young people’s compliance with public health measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and save the lives of older persons.

• COVID-19
• child health
• childhood
• media content analysis

Fake news is a serious problem because it misinforms people about important issues. The present study examined belief in false headlines about election fraud after the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Belief in election fraud had dangerous consequences, including the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021. In the present study, participants rated the truthfulness of true and false headlines about the election, and then completed individual difference measures eight days after the election. Participants with more conservative ideology, greater presidential approval of the outgoing president, greater endorsement of general conspiracy narratives and poorer cognitive reflection demonstrated greater belief in false headlines about election fraud. Additionally, consuming more politically conservative election news was associated with greater belief in false headlines. Identifying the factors related to susceptibility to false claims of election fraud offers a path toward countering the influence of these claims by tailoring interventions aimed at decreasing belief in misinformation and decreasing conspiracy beliefs to those most susceptible.

• conspiracy beliefs
• elections
• fake news
• misinformation
• political ideology

• disinformation campaigns
• fake news
• information accuracy
• information credibility
• information literacy
• misinformation

To maintain support for further investments into health research and prevent large groups of people from questioning modern science, researchers will increasingly need to master their communication of scientific progress in the 21st century to broad general population. The new generations, who inform and educate themselves online, prefer to make their own choices in what they view. This makes them vulnerable to many types of online misinformation, which is placed there mainly to attract their clicks. This evolving context could strongly undermine a consensus in the population over very important public health issues and gains. Therefore, we believe that it deserves to be recognised as a serious problem of our time that needs to be addressed. In addition to possible inaccuracies of the health information found online, the other component of the problem is how to make global public health topics and issues attractive for viewing online and engaging with. They need to compete with popular music, celebrity gossip, sports, movies and other forms of entertainment. In this issue, we bring a novel series aiming to explore effective strategies to promoting global health issues online and through other mass media, and reaching wide audiences.

The proper functioning of many sociotechnical systems depends on their level of connectivity. By removing or deactivating a specific set of nodes, a network structure can be dismantled into isolated subcomponents, thereby disrupting the malfunctioning of a system or containing the spread of misinformation or an epidemic. We propose a generalized network-dismantling framework, which can take realistic removal costs into account such as the node price, the protection level, or removal energy. We discuss applications of cost-efficient dismantling strategies to real-world problems such as containing an epidemic or dismantling criminal or corruption networks.

Finding an optimal subset of nodes in a network that is able to efficiently disrupt the functioning of a corrupt or criminal organization or contain an epidemic or the spread of misinformation is a highly relevant problem of network science. In this paper, we address the generalized network-dismantling problem, which aims at finding a set of nodes whose removal from the network results in the fragmentation of the network into subcritical network components at minimal overall cost. Compared with previous formulations, we allow the costs of node removals to take arbitrary nonnegative real values, which may depend on topological properties such as node centrality or on nontopological features such as the price or protection level of a node. Interestingly, we show that nonunit costs imply a significantly different dismantling strategy. To solve this optimization problem, we propose a method which is based on the spectral properties of a node-weighted Laplacian operator and combine it with a fine-tuning mechanism related to the weighted vertex cover problem. The proposed method is applicable to large-scale networks with millions of nodes. It outperforms current state-of-the-art methods and opens more directions for understanding the vulnerability and robustness of complex systems.

• complex systems
• network fragmentation
• network immunization
• robustness
• spectral partitioning

• Big data
• Fast data
• Google Tends
• Infodemiology
• Pertussis

• Disease Outbreaks
• Europe/epidemiology
• European Union
• Humans
• Internet/trends
• Public Health Surveillance/methods
• Search Engine/trends
• Whooping Cough/epidemiology