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Public Perceptions on the Policy of Electronic Cigarettes as Medical Products on Twitter

Starting from 1 October 2021, Australia requires a prescription for purchasing nicotine vaping products. On 29 October 2021, the UK provided a guideline to treat e-cigarettes as medical products. This study aims to understand public perceptions of the prescription policy in Australia and the UK on T...

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Autores principales: Lou, Xubin, Liu, Pinxin, Xie, Zidian, Li, Dongmei
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9915110/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36767983
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20032618
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author Lou, Xubin
Liu, Pinxin
Xie, Zidian
Li, Dongmei
author_facet Lou, Xubin
Liu, Pinxin
Xie, Zidian
Li, Dongmei
author_sort Lou, Xubin
collection PubMed
description Starting from 1 October 2021, Australia requires a prescription for purchasing nicotine vaping products. On 29 October 2021, the UK provided a guideline to treat e-cigarettes as medical products. This study aims to understand public perceptions of the prescription policy in Australia and the UK on Twitter. Tweets related to e-cigarettes from 20 September 2021 to 31 December 2021 were collected through Twitter streaming API. We adopted both a human and machine learning model to identify a total of 1795 tweets from the UK and Australia related to the prescription policy. We classified them into pro-policy, anti-policy, and neutral-to-policy groups, and further characterized tweets into different topics. Compared to Australia, the proportion of pro-policy tweets in the UK was significantly higher (19.43% vs. 10.92%, p < 0.001), while the proportion of anti-policy tweets was significantly lower (43.4% vs. 50.09%, p = 0.003). The main topics for different attitudes towards the prescription policy between the two countries showed some significant differences, for example, “help quit smoking” in the UK and “health effect of e-cigarettes” in Australia for the positive attitude, “economic effect” in the UK and “preventing smoking cessation” in Australia for the negative attitude, which reflected different public concerns. The findings might provide valuable guidance for other countries to implement a similar policy in the future.
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spelling pubmed-99151102023-02-11 Public Perceptions on the Policy of Electronic Cigarettes as Medical Products on Twitter Lou, Xubin Liu, Pinxin Xie, Zidian Li, Dongmei Int J Environ Res Public Health Article Starting from 1 October 2021, Australia requires a prescription for purchasing nicotine vaping products. On 29 October 2021, the UK provided a guideline to treat e-cigarettes as medical products. This study aims to understand public perceptions of the prescription policy in Australia and the UK on Twitter. Tweets related to e-cigarettes from 20 September 2021 to 31 December 2021 were collected through Twitter streaming API. We adopted both a human and machine learning model to identify a total of 1795 tweets from the UK and Australia related to the prescription policy. We classified them into pro-policy, anti-policy, and neutral-to-policy groups, and further characterized tweets into different topics. Compared to Australia, the proportion of pro-policy tweets in the UK was significantly higher (19.43% vs. 10.92%, p < 0.001), while the proportion of anti-policy tweets was significantly lower (43.4% vs. 50.09%, p = 0.003). The main topics for different attitudes towards the prescription policy between the two countries showed some significant differences, for example, “help quit smoking” in the UK and “health effect of e-cigarettes” in Australia for the positive attitude, “economic effect” in the UK and “preventing smoking cessation” in Australia for the negative attitude, which reflected different public concerns. The findings might provide valuable guidance for other countries to implement a similar policy in the future. MDPI 2023-02-01 /pmc/articles/PMC9915110/ /pubmed/36767983 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20032618 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Lou, Xubin
Liu, Pinxin
Xie, Zidian
Li, Dongmei
Public Perceptions on the Policy of Electronic Cigarettes as Medical Products on Twitter
title Public Perceptions on the Policy of Electronic Cigarettes as Medical Products on Twitter
title_full Public Perceptions on the Policy of Electronic Cigarettes as Medical Products on Twitter
title_fullStr Public Perceptions on the Policy of Electronic Cigarettes as Medical Products on Twitter
title_full_unstemmed Public Perceptions on the Policy of Electronic Cigarettes as Medical Products on Twitter
title_short Public Perceptions on the Policy of Electronic Cigarettes as Medical Products on Twitter
title_sort public perceptions on the policy of electronic cigarettes as medical products on twitter
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9915110/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36767983
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20032618
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