Fake news mediate the relationship between sociopolitical factors and vaccination intent in Brazil.

Vaccination hesitancy has become a central concern and is a barrier to overcoming the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis. Studies have indicated that mis/disinformation plays a role on the attitudes and behaviours towards vaccination. However, further formal statistical models are required to investigate how fake news relates to vaccination intent and how they mediate the relationship between socioeconomic/political factors and vaccination intent. We studied a sample of 500 Brazilians and found that people were mostly not susceptible to vaccine mis/disinformation. In addition, we found that their vaccination intent was high. However, suspicions that fake news could be true raised doubts over the vaccination intention. Although age and political orientation directly influenced vaccination intent, we found that the relationship between socioeconomic/political factors and vaccination intent was strongly mediated by belief in fake news. Our results raise the need to create multiple strategies to combat the dissemination and acceptance of such content.

Adaptive memory and evolution of the human naturalistic mind: Insights from the use of medicinal plants.

Throughout evolutionary history, humans have been exposed to a wide variety of diseases, some of which have serious and even lethal consequences. Memorizing medicinal plants for the treatment of serious diseases likely maximized the chances of survival and reproduction and was instrumental in the evolutionary success of our species. In the present study, we used the idea of adaptive memory to understand whether human memory evolved to recall information about medicinal plants for the treatment of serious diseases. We considered plant-disease pairs of words as units of information available in a medical system based on the use of medicinal plants. The pairs included in the categories of chronic infectious diseases and transmissible infectious diseases were considered to be of higher adaptive value, whereas those included in the category of common conditions were considered to be of lower adaptive value. Pairs grouped into the category of emerging and reemerging diseases were employed to investigate conformity bias; pairs belonging to the category esthetic uses were considered to be of little adaptive relevance and utilized as an experimental control. Our results revealed that plant-disease pairs associated with the category of common conditions, considered by us to be of lower severity and less adaptive relevance for humans, were better remembered and retained in the participants' memory. We believe that prior experience with common conditions and the frequency of these conditions in the population may have intensified the ability to remember the plant-disease pairs associated with this group of diseases.

Medicinal plants of the caatinga (semi-arid) vegetation of NE Brazil: a quantitative approach.

The caatinga (semi-arid vegetation) is a Brazilian biome with a significant but poorly studied biodiversity closely associated with a diverse cultural heritage. The present work focused on analyzing published information available concerning medicinal plants used by traditional communities. We sought to contribute to future phytochemical and pharmacological investigations by documenting the therapeutic uses of native caatinga plants within the aims of modern ethnopharmacological research. Twenty-one published works cited a total of 389 plant species used by indigenous and rural communities in northeastern Brazil for medicinal purposes. The relative importance index (RI) of each species in these inventories was calculated, and information concerning the plant's local status (spontaneous or cultivated), distribution, and habit was recorded. Of the 275 spontaneous (non-cultivated) species cited, 15.3% were endemic to the caatinga. A statistical relationship was verified between the relative importance of the species and their endemic status (p<0.05). Herbaceous plants were more numerous (169) than trees (90) or shrubs and sub-shrubs (130) at a statistically significant level (p<0.05). A survey of published information on the phytochemical and pharmacological status of the plants demonstrating the highest RI supported the veracity of their attributed folk uses.