Public perceptions and behaviours related to the risk of infection with Aedes mosquito-borne diseases: a cross-sectional study in Southeastern France

International audienceObjectives: To explore public perceptions and behaviours related to the risk of flavivirus and alphavirus infection in Southeastern regions of France following the recent colonisation of the Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, and the identification of four autochthonous cases of dengue and chikungunya fever in these regions.Design: Cross-sectional telephone survey using a proportional random digit dialling selection method.Setting: Interviews were conducted from 28 November 2011 to 29 January 2012 using a computer-assisted telephone interviewing system. Participants: 1506 French speaking adults aged 18 years or older residing in French Mediterraneanregions.Results: Protective health behaviours were found to be performed less frequently among men (AOR=0.65, 95% CI 0.52% to 0.80%), residents with lower educational status (AOR=0.61, 95% CI0.43% to 0.85% for respondents with primary school education ; AOR=0.69, 95% CI 0.53% to 0.90% for those with some secondary school education), and those living in regions where the Aedes mosquito is objectively rare (AOR=0.60, 95% CI 0.36% to 0.98% for Aude; AOR=0.63, 95% CI 0.44% to 0.89% for Herault; AOR=0.56, 95% CI 0.34% to 0.93% for Eastern Pyrenees). Empirical results also suggest that behavioural responses to infection risk are greater shaped by the perceived exposure to Aedes, notably the perceived frequency of mosquito bites (AOR=2.07, 95% CI 1.84% to 2.32%) and visual identification of Aedes mosquitoes in one’s immediate environment (AOR=1.98, 95% CI 1.45% to 2.71%) rather than by other common predictors of protective behaviours.Conclusions : These findings may help with the development of innovative instruments designed tomake more visible and personal the threat of flavivirus and alphavirus infections induced by the presence of A albopictus in order to promote significant behavioural changes among populations at risk

Beliefs and Risk Perceptions About COVID-19: Evidence From Two Successive French Representative Surveys During Lockdown

Background: The outbreak of COVID-19 has been a major interrupting event, challenging how societies and individuals deal with risk. An essential determinant of the virus’ spread is a series of individual decisions, such as wearing face masks in public space. Those decisions depend on trade-offs between costs (or benefits) and risks, and beliefs are key to explain these. Methods: We elicit beliefs about the COVID-19 pandemic during lockdown in France by means of surveys asking French citizens about their belief of the infection fatality ratio (IFR) for COVID-19, own risk to catch the disease, risk as perceived by others, and expected prevalence rate. Those self-assessments were measured twice during lockdown: about 2 weeks after lockdown started and about 2 weeks before lockdown ended. We also measured the quality of these beliefs with respect to available evidence at the time of the surveys, allowing us to assess the calibration of beliefs based on risk-related socio-demographics. Finally, comparing own risk to expected prevalence rates in the two successive surveys provides a dynamic view of comparative optimism with respect to the disease. Results: The risk perceptions are rather high in absolute terms and they increased between the two surveys. We found no evidence for an impact of personal experience with COVID-19 on beliefs and lower risk perceptions of the IFR when someone in the respondent’s family has been diagnosed with a disease. Answers to survey 1 confirmed this pattern with a clear indication that respondents were optimistic about their chances to catch COVID-19. However, in survey 2, respondents revealed comparative pessimism. Conclusion: The results show that respondents overestimated the probabilities to catch or die from COVID-19, which is not unusual and does not necessarily reflect a strong deviation from rational behavior. While a rational model explains why the own risk to catch COVID-19 rose between the two surveys, it does not explain why the subjective assessment of the IFR remained stable. The comparative pessimism in survey 2 was likely due to a concomitant increase in the respondents’ perceived chances to catch the disease and a decreased expected prevalence rate

Predicting the Lay Preventive Strategies in Response to Avian Influenza from Perceptions of the Threat

Background: The identification of patterns of behaviors that lay people would engage in to protect themselves from the risk of infection in the case of avian influenza outbreak, as well as the lay perceptions of the threat that underlie these risk reduction strategies. Methodology/Principal Findings: A population-based survey (N = 1003) was conducted in 2008 to understand and describe how the French public might respond to a possible outbreak. Factor analyses highlighted three main categories of risk reduction strategies consisting of food quality assurance, food avoidance, and animal avoidance. In combination with the fear of contracting avian influenza, mental representations associated with the manifestation and/or transmission of the disease were found to significantly and systematically shape the behavioral responses to the perceived threat. Conclusions/Significance: This survey provides insight into the nature and predictors of the protective patterns that might be expected from the general public during a novel domestic outbreak of avian influenza

AVIS de l'ANSES relatif à " l'évaluation du rapport bénéfice risque des pratiques de lutte anti-vectorielle habituellement mises en oeuvre pour lutter contre la dengue, dans le contexte actuel de confinement global "

Dans le contexte de la gestion de crise liée à l'épidémie de Covid-19 en France, l'Anses a été saisie en urgence le 14 avril 2020 par la Direction Générale de la Santé pour réaliser l'expertise suivante : " Évaluation du rapport bénéfice-risque des pratiques de lutte anti-vectorielle habituellement mises en oeuvre pour lutter contre la dengue, dans le contexte actuel de confinement global "

Unni Kjaernes, Mark Harvey, Alan Warde, Trust in food : A comparative and institutional analysis. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Raude Jocelyn. Unni Kjaernes, Mark Harvey, Alan Warde, Trust in food : A comparative and institutional analysis. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. In: Revue d’études en Agriculture et Environnement, Vol. 90, N°3, 2009. pp. 351-354

La place de la viande dans le modèle alimentaire français

National audienceThe main objective of this article is to examine the consumption of meat in the French dietary pattern. In particular, we attempted to identify the current structure and evolution in the consumption of meat-based products, the sociological distribution of the meat-based consumption, and the culinary systems of food association/substitution in which it occurs. In this aim, we analyzed the individual data of consumption stemming from nutritional surveys performed by the CRÉDOC in 1999 and 2003, as well as the recent European data about the national indigenous consumption of meats. Both samples included 1,500 representative individuals of the French adult population (quota method) who reported all their actual food consumptions over a period of one week. The data collected in these surveys tend to reveal (1) that the social segmentation of the meat-based consumption is more and more weak, and (2) the emergence and propagation of new dietary patterns in our country may contribute to explain the differences in the evolutions of the various meat-based products’consumption.L’objectif de cet article est d’examiner la place de la viande dans le modèle alimentaire français. Nous avons notamment cherché à identifier la structure et l’évolution de la consommation de produits carnés, la distribution sociologique de la consommation carnée, ainsi que les systèmes d’associations-substitutions culinaires dans lesquelles cette dernière intervient. Dans cette perspective, nous avons analysé les données individuelles de consommation issues des enquêtes alimentaires du CRÉDOC de 1999 et de 2003, et dans une moindre mesure, les données européennes de consommation apparente sur les viandes. Les deux échantillons comportaient près de 1 500 individus adultes représentatifs de la population française (méthode des quotas) qui ont rapporté l’ensemble de leurs consommations alimentaires effectives pendant une période d’une semaine. Les données de ces enquêtes tendent à montrer (1) que la segmentation sociale de la consommation carnée est de plus en plus faible et (2) que l’émergence et la diffusion de nouveaux « modèles » alimentaires sont de nature à expliquer les variations dans l’évolution de la consommation des différents produits carnés

Are perceived prevalences of infection also biased and how? Lessons from large epidemics of mosquito-borne diseases in tropical regions

Objectives: Although people have been repeatedly found to underestimate the frequency of risks to health from common diseases, we still do not know much about reasons for this systematic bias, which is also referred to as “primary bias” in the literature. In this study, we take advantage of a series of large epidemics of mosquito-borne diseases to examine the accuracy of judgments of risk frequencies. In this aim, we assessed the perceived versus the observed prevalence of infection by zika, chikungunya or dengue fever during these outbreaks, as well as their variations among different subpopulations and epidemiological settings. Design: We used data drawn from 4 telephone surveys, conducted between 2006 and 2016, among representative samples of the adult population in tropical regions (Reunion, Martinique, and French Guiana). The participants were asked to estimate the prevalence of these infections by using a natural frequency scale. Results: The surveys showed that (1) most people greatly overestimated the prevalence of infection by arbovirus, (2) these risk overestimations fell considerably as the actual prevalence of these diseases increased, (3) the better-educated and male participants consistently yielded less inaccurate risk estimates across epidemics, and (4) that these biases in the perception of prevalence of these infectious diseases are relatively well predicted by probability weighting function. Conclusions: These findings suggest that the cognitive biases that affect perception of prevalence of acute infectious diseases are not fundamentally different from those that characterize other types of probabilistic judgments observed in the field of behavioral decision-making. They also indicate that numeracy may play a considerable role in people’s ability to transform epidemiological observations from their social environment to more accurate risk estimates

Determinants of preventive behaviors in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in France: comparing the sociocultural, psychosocial and social cognitive explanations.

In absence of effective pharmaceutical treatments, the individual’s compliance with a series of behavioral recommendations provided by the public health authorities play a critical role in the control and prevention of SARS-CoV2 infection. However, we still do not know much about the rate and determinants of adoption of the recommended health behaviors. This paper examines the compliance with the main behavioral recommendations, and compares sociocultural, psychosocial and social cognitive explanations for its variation in the French population. Based on the current literature, these 3 categories of factors were identified as potential determinants of individual differences in the health preventive behaviors. The data used for these analyses are drawn from 2 cross-sectional studies (N ≥ 2,000) conducted after the lockdown and before the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic in France. The participants were drawn from a larger internet consumer panel where recruitment was stratified to generate a socio-demographically representative sample of the French adult population. Overall, the results show a very high rate of compliance with the behavioral recommendations among the participants. A series of linear regression analyses were then performed to assess the potential explanatory power of these approaches in complying with these recommendations by successively including sociocultural factors, psychosocial factors, social cognitive factors, and then all factors, in the model. Only the inclusion of the cognitive variables substantially increased the explained variance of the self-reported adoption of preventive behaviors, providing better support for the social cognitive than the sociocultural and psychosocial explanations

Comment mieux prévenir les maladies infectieuses : les apports des sciences comportementales [Communication - Séance Plénière SP3]

Special issue : Livre des résumés - XXXIe Congrès de la Société Française de Transfusion Sanguine (SFTS) - Toulouse, du 29 novembre au 1er décembre 2023International audienceA partir du 19ème siècle, l’association de développements technologiques (traitement de l’eau, vaccins, antiseptiques) et de changements socioculturels (hygiène, éducation, urbanisation) majeurs a été partout à l’origine de progrès spectaculaires dans le contrôle et la prévention des maladies infectieuses – avec notamment la quasi-disparition du choléra, de la peste ou de la tuberculose dans les pays développés. D’une manière générale, il faut souligner que cette révolution sanitaire a été réalisée pour l’essentiel sous l’impulsion des politiques publiques paternalistes plus ou moins autoritaires qui semblaient susciter l’adhésion d’une grande majorité de la population en raison de leurs effets manifestes sur la santé publique. A partir des années 80, un glissement peut toutefois être observé dans les rapports entre la population et les institutions sanitaires. Comme l’a montré la pandémie de COVID-19, les politiques de prévention se heurtent de plus en plus fréquemment au doute, à la méfiance ou même la complaisance d’un nombre croissant de nos concitoyens. Dans ce contexte, l’approche paternaliste qui avait permis la maîtrise des maladies infectieuses apparait de plus en plus inopérante. Aussi, quels sont les alternatives possibles à cette approche classique et avec quelle l'efficacité ? Dans le cadre de cette présentation, nous passerons en revue les principales découvertes au sein des sciences comportementales appliquées à la prévention et nous discuterons des avantages et des limites des méthodes proposées par les chercheurs de ces disciplines pour faire face aux nombreux défis que les acteurs de la santé publique devront relever dans les prochaines années