Perceptions of tick-borne encephalitis risk: a survey of travellers and travel clinics from Canada, Germany, Sweden and the UK
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: While the worldwide endemicity of tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) has been increasing, a lack of awareness of the risks of this life-threatening disease may be leading to an underutilization of preventive measures among travellers to TBE-endemic regions. This study's objectives were to assess travellers' awareness of TBE and advice-seeking attitudes, and to evaluate practices of travel clinics regarding pre-travel advice. Methods: We used an online questionnaire to identify individuals aged 18-65 years residing in the UK, Germany, Canada and Sweden, who had travelled to TBE-endemic countries between 2013 and 2016. This sample was defined as the visit-risk sample. Of these, the first 375 respondents who reported that they had engaged in pre-defined at-risk activities (e.g. hiking in forests) were asked to complete an additional online survey and were included in the activity-risk sub-sample. We also used an online/phone questionnaire to interview travel clinic personnel. Results: The TBE visit-risk sample included 4375 individuals; 69% had heard of the disease and 32% had heard of a TBE vaccine. Before travelling, travellers most commonly sought information online (26%); fewer travellers consulted family doctors (8%) or travel clinics (5%). In the activity-risk sample, 79% of the travellers were aware of at least one correct TBE prevention measure; however, only 15% reported being vaccinated within the past 3 years, with 11% of vaccinated travellers doing so following a clinic's recommendation. One hundred and eighty travel clinic representatives responded and reported that TBE vaccination was recommended to an average of 61% of travellers to endemic regions. Vaccination-reminder services such as follow-up appointments, e-mail and text reminders were offered by 50% of the clinics. Conclusions: There is a need to increase awareness of the risk and prevention of TBE among travellers to endemic countries, and travel clinics could play an important role in this process. 5975671594001tay062media15975671594001.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".