WORLDWIDE CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAKS. THE COMMITMENT OF THE EUROPEAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION (EMA)

EMA is actively developing with our Member Experts easy-to-use recommendation suitable to define the best EBM criteria and guidelines; they should be suitable to discard promptly questionable guidelines, hidden business advertisements and misleading statements.

Some of such advices and suggestions are seemingly spread from sources biased by Conflict of interests situations, both in diagnostics (such as conjectural ultrasound diagnostics) and in therapeutics (such as in anecdotal or pseudo-trials reports). A timely feedback and reactions from the medical community is needed. We will use for this purpose these main dissemination tools, apart the EMA webpage www.emanet.org :

1. The official EMA facebook page https://www.facebook.com/EuropeanMedicalAssociation/

2. The official Twitter account https://twitter.com/medicalemanet?lang=en

3. Newsletters delivered by EMA’s Mailchimp.

4. Articles in LinkedIn published by the President and/or the Director

a weekly meeting of EMA’s Board and selected expert will be done: these webinars will be hosted and chaired by the President.

The ongoing strategy which is in place in China for containing the new Coronavirus epidemics should be carefully followed and interpreted, from any side. Indeed, it is seemingly based also on a shortage of informations, at least as delivered abroad, whose quality and profile may change day-by-day. A major problem is related to the challenges of Emergency and of segmented health systems mainly if based, as in many Western Countries, on reserved and even confidential repositories of very private networks.

Accordingly, EMA is strongly warranting the need of overcoming this gap sharing and qualifying better, by appropriate validation processes, most big data repositories, worldwide and at the European level, and addressing with warnings several unsupported appealing claims in therapeutics and diagnostics of CoronaVirus-19 disease.

This is mostly relevant for rejecting and debunking unsupported and misleading claims, which is a mission pursued only by relatively few Institutions and Associations. Scientific communities and peer reviewed medical and scientific Journals are in the forefront of this battle against anti-science and even against the awkward attempts to deceive policy and public opinion.

The expertise in the use of social medias and of validated e-learning platforms as strategic tools must be empowered, particularly in the current scenario of possible European shortages of resources and findings. The requests of easy to understand proof of the evidence for the benefits of modern technology often hidden a true hostility vs. evidence based medicine and science. The best answer is to spread actively well-supported information and studies within the culture of acknowledging the need of expertise, research and ethics.