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People’s attitudes towards vaccines can now be detected from their social media posts with a smart AI model, developed by researchers at the University of Warwick. An AI-based model can analyze social media posts and determine the author’s attitude towards vaccines, by being ‘trained’ to recognize that attitude from a small number of sample tweets. As a simple example, if a post contains mention of distrust of health care institutions, fear of needles, or something related to a known conspiracy theory, the model can recognize that the person who wrote it may have negative feelings about vaccinations. The research, funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will be presented today (12 July) at the North American Association of Computational Linguistics Annual Conference 2022. It is led by Professor Yulan He from the University’s Department of Computer Science, supported by a 5-year Turing AI Fellowship funded by the EPSRC. Professor He and his colleagues at the University of Warwick h

The World Health Organization today released the first report on a line of vaccines currently under development to prevent infections caused by antimicrobial-resistant (AMR) pathogenic bacteria. WHO analysis points to the need to accelerate AMR-related vaccine trials in late-stage development and maximize use of existing vaccines. The silent antimicrobial resistance pandemic is a major growing public health concern. Resistant bacterial infections alone are associated with nearly 4.95 million deaths per year, with 1.27 million deaths directly attributable to AMR. But AMR is more than just a bacterial infection. AMR occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites change over time and no longer respond to medications. When a person is infected with these microbes, the infection is said to be resistant to antimicrobial drugs. These infections are often difficult to treat. Vaccines are a powerful tool for preventing infection in the first place, and therefore have the potential to

A study of the herpes virus infecting chickens offers new insight into the potentially problematic interactions between vaccines made from live viruses and viruses that are meant to be thwarted. Reported in the journal Virulence, the study offers direct evidence that vaccines and viruses can infect the same cells in live animals and share the molecular tools that allow the virus to infect other animals – in this case, chickens. The study focused on Marek’s disease, a viral infection that is spread when a chicken inhales flakes of dead skin or feather tissue from an infected chicken. “We’ve been trying to understand how the virus spreads from one host to another,” said University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign pathobiology professor Keith Jarosinski, who led the study. “Not only did we do it for the benefit of chickens in the poultry industry, but also because of a very similar mechanism used by the virus that causes chickenpox, where it enters through the respiratory tract and infects l