Press Review of the week
June 13th 2011
Internet access is a basic human right and can be a tool of empowerment, according to a United Nations report leaded by UN Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue. As we said in a previous post, Internet growth among Arab population is particularly strategic to overcome the coming health challenges. Moreover Internet soars in Arab world: according to Abbas Alidina, FaceBook users are more than 56 million people in the Middle East & North Africa (MENA), which represents an increase of 51% over the last year and 10% of all users over the world (600 million FaceBook users worldwide).
Internet is one of the most powerful instruments of the 21st century for increasing transparency in the conduct of the powerful, access to information, and for facilitating active citizen participation in building democratic societies. Indeed, the recent wave of demonstrations in countries across the Middle East and North African region has shown the key role that the Internet can play in mobilizing the population to call for justice, equality, accountability and better respect for human rights.
Franck La Rue
However, the Canadian Peter Foster, from the National Post, taking the case of cellphones in Africa, underlines “In 1998, there were less than four million mobile phones in Africa. Today, there are over four hundred million.(…) The outcome of the political thrust is still uncertain, that of the economic thrust is not. Did it come about as the result of Millennium Development Goals? No, it came about because of profit-oriented entrepreneurs and private sector”. Angie Nassar, from NowLebanon, wonders about this “right” depending on what you search on the Web…
E-health and prevention are a key to chronic disease. The new technology is there albeit patient’s education and awareness remain low. Especially when we read on ArabNews that in Saudi Arabia diabetes might grow by 283% by 2030. And according to a study released by Health Authority Abu Dhabi(Haad), 80% patients fail to keep diabetes under check, mostly among young people. Will high tech revolution change fundamental attitudes and behaviors toward health? Internet user should be “educated” to get information and prevention about disease.
Nevertheless in a recent study1, the concept of ”social groups wisdom“, which health 2.0 is rooted in, seems to be not really true because even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect in three different ways:
- “The “social influence effect” diminishes the diversity of the crowd without improvements of its collective error.
- The “range reduction effect” moves the position of the truth to peripheral regions of the range of estimates so that the crowd becomes less reliable in providing expertise for external observers.
- The “confidence effect” boosts individuals’ confidence after convergence of their estimates despite lack of improved accuracy.“
There is every reason to believe that patient empowerment and its access to care and to basic human right rely on strong and transparent health public policies.
