Tobacco, nicotine and counter-marketing promotions using Instagram's branded content tool.

BACKGROUND: The social media conglomerate, Meta, has a policy prohibiting promotion of tobacco products, vaporisers, electronic cigarettes or other products that simulate smoking via their branded content tools. This study examines if branded Instagram posts comply with these self-regulatory efforts. METHODS: We analysed the presence and content of tobacco/nicotine promotion, as well as counter-marketing, in a sample of 400 branded/paid partnership-labelled Instagram posts with tobacco/nicotine-related terms made between 31 July 2022 and 31 March 2023, gathered from Meta's CrowdTangle tool and classified by CrowdTangle as being in English. RESULTS: Of the 217 active branded posts that mentioned or depicted tobacco/nicotine products, most promoted rather than countered the sale of such products (84.3% vs 15.7%, respectively). Posts originating from US Instagram users accounted for 42.6% of promotional content. After the USA, posts from Indonesia (19.1%), Pakistan (9.8%) and India (8.2%) were most frequent. Most posts were fully in English (74.9%). Posts featured hookah (39.4%), electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) accessories (17.5%), ENDS devices and e-liquids (16.9%) and various types of cigars (15.3%). The majority of US posts promoted venues or events where tobacco/nicotine products were featured (71.8%). Almost half of all promotional posts (47.0%) were sponsored by tobacco industry accounts. Posts that encouraged cessation were primarily (47.1%) sponsored by non-government organisations. CONCLUSION: Despite attempts at self-regulation, paid partnership posts promoting tobacco and nicotine products are present on Instagram, especially posts promoting venues and events that feature tobacco and nicotine use. Self-regulation of this content shows limited success, suggesting a need for federal oversight and additional counter-marketing in social media settings.

COVID-19 Vaccine-Related Discussion on Twitter: Topic Modeling and Sentiment Analysis.

BACKGROUND: Vaccination is a cornerstone of the prevention of communicable infectious diseases; however, vaccines have traditionally met with public fear and hesitancy, and COVID-19 vaccines are no exception. Social media use has been demonstrated to play a role in the low acceptance of vaccines. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to identify the topics and sentiments in the public COVID-19 vaccine-related discussion on social media and discern the salient changes in topics and sentiments over time to better understand the public perceptions, concerns, and emotions that may influence the achievement of herd immunity goals. METHODS: Tweets were downloaded from a large-scale COVID-19 Twitter chatter data set from March 11, 2020, the day the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, to January 31, 2021. We used R software to clean the tweets and retain tweets that contained the keywords vaccination, vaccinations, vaccine, vaccines, immunization, vaccinate, and vaccinated. The final data set included in the analysis consisted of 1,499,421 unique tweets from 583,499 different users. We used R to perform latent Dirichlet allocation for topic modeling as well as sentiment and emotion analysis using the National Research Council of Canada Emotion Lexicon. RESULTS: Topic modeling of tweets related to COVID-19 vaccines yielded 16 topics, which were grouped into 5 overarching themes. Opinions about vaccination (227,840/1,499,421 tweets, 15.2%) was the most tweeted topic and remained a highly discussed topic during the majority of the period of our examination. Vaccine progress around the world became the most discussed topic around August 11, 2020, when Russia approved the world's first COVID-19 vaccine. With the advancement of vaccine administration, the topic of instruction on getting vaccines gradually became more salient and became the most discussed topic after the first week of January 2021. Weekly mean sentiment scores showed that despite fluctuations, the sentiment was increasingly positive in general. Emotion analysis further showed that trust was the most predominant emotion, followed by anticipation, fear, sadness, etc. The trust emotion reached its peak on November 9, 2020, when Pfizer announced that its vaccine is 90% effective. CONCLUSIONS: Public COVID-19 vaccine-related discussion on Twitter was largely driven by major events about COVID-19 vaccines and mirrored the active news topics in mainstream media. The discussion also demonstrated a global perspective. The increasingly positive sentiment around COVID-19 vaccines and the dominant emotion of trust shown in the social media discussion may imply higher acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines compared with previous vaccines.

Relationship Between Patient Characteristics and Number of Procedures as well as Length of Stay for Patients Surviving Severe Burn Injuries: Analysis of the American Burn Association National Burn Repository.

This study establishes important, national benchmarks for burn centers to assess length of stay (LOS) and number of procedures across patient profiles. We examined the relationship between patient characteristics such as age and total body surface area (TBSA) burned and number of procedures and LOS in the United States, using the American Burn Association National Burn Repository (NBR) database version 8.0 (2002-2011). Among 21,175 surviving burn patients (TBSA > 10-60%), mean age was 33 years, and mean injury size was 19.9% TBSA. Outcomes included the number of debridement, excision, autograft procedures, and LOS. Independent variables considered were: age (linear, squared, and cubed to account for nonlinearity), TBSA, TBSAs of partial-thickness and mixed/full-thickness burns, sex, hospital-acquired infection, other infection, inhalation injury, and diabetes status. Regression methods included a mixed-effects model for LOS and ordinary least squares for number of procedures. A backward stepwise procedure (P <0.2) was used to select variables. Number of excision and autografting procedures increased with TBSA; however, this relationship did not hold for debridement. After adjusting for sex, age, and comorbidities, predicted LOS for adults (18+) was 12.1, 21.7, 32.2, 43.7, and 56.1 days for 10, 20, 30, 40, and 50% TBSA, respectively. Similarly, predicted LOS for pediatrics (age < 18) was 8.1, 18.8, 33.2, 47.6, and 56.1 days for the same TBSA groups, respectively. While average estimates for adults (1.12 days) and pediatrics (1.01) are close to the one day/TBSA rule-of-thumb, consideration of other important patient and burn features in the NBR can better refine predictions for LOS.