How to Fight an Infodemic: The Four Pillars of Infodemic Management

The World Health Organization (WHO) is presenting a framework for managing the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) infodemic. Infodemiology is now acknowledged by public health organizations and the WHO as an important emerging scientific field and critical area of practice during a pandemic.

From the perspective of being the first “infodemiolgist” who originally coined the term almost two decades ago, the author posts four pillars of infodemic management:

• Information monitoring (infoveillance)
• Building eHealth Literacy and science literacy capacity
• Encouraging knowledge refinement and quality improvement processes such as fact checking and peer-review
• Accurate and timely knowledge translation, minimizing distorting factors such as political or commercial influences

Last modified: July 21, 2020

Language: English