Source: www.inquirer.com Author: Marie McCullough To persuade more people to get the cancer-preventing HPV vaccination, public health groups should emulate a tactic of the anti-vaccine movement, concludes a Drexel University study of Instagram posts. The researchers aren’t suggesting that vaccine proponents spread misinformation on social media, as vaccine foes do. But the study found that emotional, personal accounts with photos of youngsters — a staple of anti-vaccine content — get way more “likes” than the dispassionate, factual messages typical of pro-vaccine posts. “By studying what makes these messages so effective, we can improve fact-based, pro-vaccination messaging,” said senior author Philip M. Massey, a community health researcher at Drexel. The study, which analyzed 360 Instagram posts from April to August of last year, was conducted before Facebook — the owner of Instagram — announced this spring that it would curb anti-vaccine messages. But such content still abounds, because Facebook’s crackdown is limited to recommendations and ads. Before the crackdown, a majority of Facebook ads spreading vaccine misinformation were funded by just two groups, one led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s World Mercury Project, according to a study published this month in the journal Vaccine. Another study, in JAMA Pediatrics in September, found that 13 years after Merck’s Gardasil vaccine was hailed as a revolution in cancer prevention, most Americans still don’t know that HPV (human papillomavirus) is a family of sexually transmitted germs that can cause oral and genital cancers, and most doctors still aren’t promoting the shots. The immunization is [...]