Characteristics of Patients with Acute Flaccid Myelitis, United States, 2015-2018.

Observed peaks of acute flaccid myelitis (AFM) cases have occurred biennially since 2014 in the United States. We aimed to determine if AFM etiology differed between peak and nonpeak years, considering that clinical features of AFM differ by virus etiology. We compared clinical and laboratory characteristics of AFM cases that occurred during peak (2016 and 2018, n = 366) and nonpeak (2015 and 2017, n = 50) years. AFM patients in peak years were younger (5.2 years) than those in nonpeak years (8.3 years). A higher percentage of patients in peak years than nonpeak years had pleocytosis (86% vs. 60%), upper extremity involvement (33% vs. 16%), and an illness preceding limb weakness (90% vs. 62%) and were positive for enterovirus or rhinovirus RNA (38% vs. 16%). Enterovirus D68 infection was associated with AFM only in peak years. Our findings suggest AFM etiology differs between peak and nonpeak years.

Trends in stigmatizing language about addiction: A longitudinal analysis of multiple public communication channels.

INTRODUCTION: Stigma associated with substance use and addiction is a major barrier to overdose prevention. Although stigma reduction is a key goal of federal strategies to prevent overdose, there is limited data to assess progress made in reducing use of stigmatizing language about addiction. METHODS: Using language guidelines published by the federal National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), we examined trends in use of stigmatizing terms about addiction across four popular public communication modalities: news articles, blogs, Twitter, and Reddit. We calculate percent changes in the rates of articles/posts using stigmatizing terms over a five-year period (2017-2021) by fitting a linear trendline and assess statistically significant trends using the Mann-Kendall test. RESULTS: The rate of articles containing stigmatizing language decreased over the past five years for news articles (-68.2 %, p < 0.001) and blogs (-33.6 %, p < 0.001). Among social media platforms, the rate of posts using stigmatizing language increased (Twitter [43.5 %, p = 0.01]) or remained stable (Reddit [3.1 %, p = 0.29]). In absolute terms, news articles had the highest rate of articles containing stigmatizing terms over the five-year period (324.9 articles per million) compared to 132.3, 18.3, and 138.6 posts per million for blogs, Twitter, and Reddit, respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Use of stigmatizing language about addiction appears to have decreased across more traditional, longer-format communication modalities such as news articles. Additional work is needed to reduce use of stigmatizing language on social media.