The director of the Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII), Marina Pollán, has underlined the importance of promoting scientific education from an early age so that children and adolescents "grow up understanding better how science works, have the knowledge to trust their possibilities and manage the expectations it generates".
Pollán made these statements during the conference "Science, health protection and the fight against disinformation", jointly organized by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) and the Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII).
At the meeting, researchers, communicators, disseminators, health professionals and representatives of patient associations analyzed how to convey reliable scientific information to citizens in a scenario where disinformation has a growing weight.
The director of the ISCIII stressed that it is essential to convey to the public that science "sometimes has difficult messages to transmit, which forces us to use the generated knowledge responsibly and does not always have the answer that citizens may expect".
She also recalled that Spanish society "responds and collaborates, as was seen in the pandemic with studies such as seroprevalence and as is now seen with projects such as IMPaCT, which show that there are good levels of trust".
On the other hand, the director of FECYT, Izaskun Lacunza, agreed that the link between science and citizenship "is stronger, more demanding and more direct today thanks to the existence of more channels, greater access to information and the development of more scientific culture initiatives".
Both officials also addressed the value of open science. Lacunza pointed out that this approach has matured over time to become a key element for the scientific community. "From FECYT we try to add value by offering rigorous scientific information with tools such as SINC, the SMC or the scientific communication Science project," she indicated.
Scientific evidence and public health policy design
The first panel of the conference, titled "Health research, dissemination and influence on the development of public health policies. Success stories", focused on the role of biomedical research and its capacity to guide public policies.
The speakers have presented various practical cases that show how scientific evidence contributes to the implementation of public health measures, and how communication and dissemination allow citizens to better understand institutional actions aimed at improving health.
The second session was dedicated to the challenge of curbing health misinformation from different areas of research and scientific communication.
In this block, the difficulty of rigorously informing about health issues in an environment saturated with hoaxes was explored, starting from a precise definition of what is understood by health misinformation and the reasons why the population is particularly vulnerable to it. Throughout the exchange, it was analyzed how the COVID-19 pandemic has modified the relationship between science, institutions, media, and citizens, generating greater involvement and capacity for questioning, but also increasing the sense of uncertainty and bewilderment.
Likewise, the main obstacles to clearly and accessibly conveying scientific evidence, the loss of trust in institutions and media, and the direct consequences that hoaxes have on patients' health decisions have been examined.
Finally, different ways to strengthen health communication have been proposed, focusing on the need to anticipate misinformation, promote critical thinking, strengthen the role of health professionals and patient organizations, and find an adequate balance between rigor, simplicity, and usefulness in the information received by citizens.