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Abstract
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The 2020-2021 was an unprecedented time, where the world experienced not one, but two major pandemics: COVID-19 and the incredible spread of violence. Both these pandemics profoundly impacted society as a whole and will have long-lasting consequences and implications for generations to come. As of 14 November 2021, COVID-19 had an astonishing toll with more than 253 million reported infected individuals worldwide and more than 5.0 million reported deaths,1 all while the number of infected people and deaths are still rising in some countries. The second pandemic of violence erupted in local communities, regions and nations, and the consequences reach far beyond country borders. The impact of rapidly rising violence was costly and profound, affecting many people around the world.
Dramatic public-health measures such as lockdown, testing and isolating infected people, tracing and quarantining their contacts, social distancing, wearing masks, and COVID-19 vaccines have been proven to slow transmission and decrease mortality. The underlying principle guiding the concept and development of these approaches is the epidemiological triad of infectious disease transmission model. Identifying and sequencing the COVID-19 virus as the biological agent was key in fighting the pandemic and for developing the mRNA vaccines, providing a light of hope at the end of the pandemic tunnel. In contrast, with the violence pandemic, researchers, politicians and the general public are still scratching their heads over vexing questions: how infodemics (a rapid and far-reaching spread of both accurate and inaccurate information) and violence originate, and why they continue to haunt our society.2
I hereby wish to suggest an agent for the contagion of the infodemics, violence, suicide and other social events in our society.2-4 I consider this agent to be messages or information that seem to mimic biological agents (viruses, bacteria, parasites or other microbes) or chemical contaminants to infect people, and therefore call these 'infobugs'. Infobugs can be defined as physical, electronic or audio messages, images, data information that exist and circulate in a physical, social or virtual environment. The concept of infobugs has novel features which are of considerable social, scientific and intervention policy implications.
A conceptual model, the Haddon Matrix, was proposed by William Haddon Jr in 1970s and is commonly used to guide ideas for preventing and treating injuries of many types, including those due to violence.5 6 The matrix consists of four columns and three rows that integrate the agent-host-environment concept into targets of change in primary, secondary and tertiary prevention of injuries. Social environment was added in 1998 by Carol Runyan to 'facilitate its application in decision making'.7 In my opinion, the Haddon Matrix is unsatisfactory in understanding and guiding interventions targeting contagious transmission of violence and suicide for two reasons: first of all, the current Haddon Matrix framework falls short in the mounting evidence showing contagion of violence, suicide and other injuries (eg, motor vehicle fatalities increase just after publicised suicide stories).8 Agents proposed in the Matrix are numerous, change by injury types and energy transfer is emphasised as the key for causing injury and designing prevention programmes and policies. Second, the Haddon Matrix was conceptualised and developed before the internet era, and Runyan added the third dimension of the social environment before social media was created. New technology and concepts such as virtual social networking, online dating, violent digital media, cyberbullying, infodemics, infodemiology, infoveillance and so on did not exist...
Language: en |