#epidemiology — Public Fediverse posts

Avoiding areas thought to be disease hotspots may actually make outbreaks worse if local case reporting is incomplete. New research involving #WorldPop scientists reveals how travel behaviour can distort health data and hide disease risks, especially in rural areas. Better local reporting could save lives.

https://www.worldpop.org/blog/why-staying-away-from-infection-hotspots-can-backfire/

#GlobalHealth #PublicHealth #Epidemiology #GeoHealth #DiseaseSurveillance

What is the future of nutritional epidemiology?

Open Access
doi.org/10.59717/j.x...

#Nutrition #Diet #Epidemiology #health #aging #food

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:uqeu4u5bjwieganft5z42pkk/post/3muuetkyaas2m

Challenges, advances and futur...

Idyllic rural NSW is a hotspot for motor neurone disease

"Our recent mortality paper shows that if you live in rural and regional Australia, you are 40 per cent more likely to die from motor neurone disease. This cannot be genetic."
"Much attention will be focused on MND hotspots which include regional centres such as Griffith, Leeton, Wagga Wagga and Narrandera in the Riverina where rates of the degenerative illness are estimated to be five to seven times the national average. Other areas of concern include Tamworth, Coffs Harbour and Port Macquarie." >>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-01/mnd-notifiable-disease-starts/107097432
#environment #diseases #MDN #NSW #CoffsHarbour #PortMacquarie #RuralNSW #MidNorthCoast #water #pollution #ExtremeHeat #runoff #HABs #pesticides #epidemiology

#Influenza #H3N2 #epidemiology in #England during the 2025 to 2026 season: a mathematical modelling study, https://etidiohnew.blogspot.com/2026/08/influenza-h3n2-epidemiology-in-england.html

Toxoplasmosis is a widespread parasitic infection caused by Toxoplasma gondii, which affects approximately one-third of the global population and can cause severe ocular and neurological damage.
#Parasitology #Ophthalmology #Epidemiology #PublicHealth #Cats #sflorg
https://www.sflorg.com/2026/06/epi06252601.html

First European case of H9N2 bird flu reported in Italy – what you need to know
#BirdFlu #H9N2 #PublicHealth #HealthNews #Influenza #Virology #GlobalHealth #DiseaseOutbreak #HealthAwareness #MedicalNews #ScienceNews #Epidemiology #Prevention #Healthcare
https://the-14.com/first-european-case-of-h9n2-bird-flu-reported-in-italy-what-you-need-to-know/

#Antibiotic treatments can alter the composition and diversity of the #bacterial community in the #gastrointestinal tract, known as the gut microbiome, with measurable disruptions persisting for four to eight years after a single course of treatment.
#Epidemiology #Microbiology #Pharmaceutical #Medical #sflorg
https://www.sflorg.com/2026/03/mcb03112601.html

Astroturfing Is Pretty Pointless When Social Subgraphs Are Fragmented (e.g., the Fediverse)

I am seeing astroturfing in the fediverse again, by AT Protocol developers implicitly trying to shill their products. I think it is stochastic behavior by developers with too much time on their hands. Honestly, I do not care. I like the people on ActivityPub more, but I like the AT Protocol better, and I have developed for both. Astroturfing on ActivityPub networks is fascinating to me because it is so pointless.

I am actually a Computational Biologist and Computer Scientist whose specialty is combinatorics, social graphs, graph theory, etc. Specifically, I use this to create epidemiological models for the memetic layer of human behaviors that act as vectors for diseases, using the SIRS model. I do not just study germs; I study human behaviors.

The models I construct extend into a “memetic layer,” in which beliefs, norms, and behaviors (such as risk-taking, compliance with public health measures, or susceptibility to misinformation) spread contagiously through social networks. These behaviors function as vectors that modulate biological transmission rates. As a result, the spread of ideas can accelerate, dampen, or reshape the spread of disease. By running computational simulations and agent-based models on these graphs, I study how network structure, influential nodes, clustering, and platform-specific dynamics affect behavioral contagion. I also examine how these factors influence epidemiological outcomes.

To say it very concisely, I study how the spread of bat-shit insane beliefs, shit posts, and memes influences whether or not there is a measles outbreak in Texas. Ironically, this is an evolution of my studying semiotics, memetics, and chaos magick in high school. I got a job where I can use occult, anarchist techniques professionally.

I think a large reason why I do not care about astroturfing in the fediverse is that it’s so pointless, lol. Astroturfing to manipulate the narrative would actually work better on Bluesky to keep people there than trying to recruit from the fediverse. Furthermore, big instances are relatively small. Some people on Bluesky have follower lists larger than an entire large instance in the fediverse.

Within ActivityPub networks, astroturfing rarely propagates far, because whether information spreads depends on properties of the social graph itself. Dense connectivity, short paths between communities, and a sufficient number of cross-cutting ties support diffusion. ActivityPub’s architecture tends to produce graphs that are fragmented and highly modular. This limits the reach of coordinated activity.

ActivityPub is a system where each instance maintains its own local user graph and exchanges activities through inboxes and outboxes. This makes it autonomous and decentralized. The network consists of loosely connected subgraphs. Cross-instance edges appear only through explicit follow relationships. The ActivityPub protocol does not provide a shared or complete view of the network. Measurements of the fediverse consistently show uneven connectivity between instances, clustering at the instance level, and relatively long effective path lengths across the network. Under these conditions, large cascades are uncommon.

Instance-level clustering means that in ActivityPub networks, users interact much more with others on the same server than with users on different servers. Because each instance has its own local timeline, culture, and moderation, connections form densely within instances and only sparsely across them through explicit follow relationships. This creates a network made up of tightly connected local communities linked by relatively few cross-instance ties, which slows the spread of information beyond its point of origin.

However, with the AT Protocol, global indexing and aggregation are explicitly supported. Relays and indexers can assemble near-complete views of the social graph. Applications built on top of this infrastructure operate over a graph that is denser and easier to traverse. There are fewer structural barriers between communities. The diffusion dynamics change substantially when content can move across the graph without relying on narrow federated paths.

Astroturfing depends on coordinated amplification, typically through tightly synchronized clusters of accounts intended to manufacture visibility. Work on coordinated inauthentic behavior shows that these tactics gain traction when they intersect highly connected regions of the graph or bridge otherwise separate communities. In networks with strong modularity, coordination remains local. ActivityPub’s federation model produces this kind of modularity by default. Coordinated clusters stand out clearly within instances. Their effects remain confined to those local neighborhoods.

Astroturfing on ActivityPub therefore tends to stall on its own because of the underlying graph topology. Without dense inter-instance connectivity or any form of global indexing, coordinated campaigns have a hard time moving beyond the immediate regions where they originate. Systems built on globally indexable social graphs, including those enabled by the AT Protocol, expose a much larger surface for viral spread. Network structure and connectivity account for the divergence where that is independent of moderation, cultural norms, ideology, or intent.

It’s just really funny to me how these stochastic techbro groups waste so many resources. I personally don’t want to go viral, which is why I avoid platforms where I can. The fact that it’s harder to achieve high virality on ActivityPub is exactly why I prefer the fediverse over the Atmosphere. One way to think about it is that you can change the ‘genetics’ of a system with a retrovirus, where memetic entities act as cultural retroviruses to reprogram the cultural loci of a space. That is their end goal. They are trying to hijack cultures memetically. You see this a lot with culture jamming.

Basically, the astroturfing on ActivityPub networks is designed to jam and subvert the culture. But, as I have already said, the topological structure makes memetic virality stall. They cannot achieve that kind of viral spread in the fediverse, which is why I cannot understand why they do this every year.

All #active #tick #stages (including #Larvae !) feed on #deer , thus enabling #cofeeding #transmission of tick-borne #Diseases

#FREE #Full #text #PDF available at https://goo.gl/gEAbfN

#Ixodes #ricinus #Capreolus #capreolus

#EU #FP6 #EDEN #Project #Emerging #Diseases in a changing #European #eNvironment #Epidemiology #Ticks #Parasites #Pathogens #Science #Scientific #Research #Data #OpenAccess #DOI #Germany #Deutschland #Europe #Europa #TBD #Zoonoses #ZoonoticDiseases #TickBorneDiseases