Knowledge, attitudes and practices about vaccination in Trentino, Italy in 2019

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Vaccination is among the most important areas of progress in the worldwide history of public health. However, a crescent wave of anti-vaccine groups has grown in Western countries, especially in Italy, in the last two decades. Our aim was to evaluate adult’s hesitancy and knowledge about vaccines and related diseases in Trentino-Alto Adige -the Italian region with the lowest vaccination coverages.

Methods: We administered self-answered structured questionnaires in three malls in the Trentino province in June 2019. We collected demographic data and information on knowledge about vaccines, infectious diseases and attitude in seeking health information. We utilized a descriptive and multivariate analysis to investigate factors associated with vaccine hesitancy.

Results: We collected 567 questionnaires, 18% of the people interviewed were hesitant toward vaccination and 16% were against mandatory vaccination. In the multivariate analysis a poor level of information, being younger than 60 years and being against compulsory vaccination were associated with vaccine hesitancy. Regarding information about vaccines, 76.5% of the people relied on physicians, and/or 49% navigated the internet, while social media are used by 16% of the study population. Though 41.5% searched information on official sites, only 14% knew the website VaccinarSì and 4.7% had visited it.

Discussion: Compared to a previous study conducted in all of Italy except Trentino Alto Adige, the level of vaccination hesitancy was higher. It is important to utilize health professionals, the internet and especially social media to spread scientific information about vaccination.

KEYWORDS:

• Vaccination
• mandatory
• information
• Trentino
• VaccinarSì

Acknowledgments

To the department of prevention of Trento and the University of Verona for supporting this work, to Luciane Murrone for designing the communication tools used for the survey. To Jim and Laury Young for their careful corrections.

Ethics and consent to participate

All participants gave their oral consent to participate and could retract at any time. All the data was completely anonymous. The directors of the shopping centers signed a participation agreement in accordance with the requirements of the Trento Bioethics Committee. SurveyMonkey, the survey program, is certified by the two Privacy Shield EU-US and Swiss-US programs (privacyshield.gov) that provide a legal framework for the collection, exploitation, transfer and analysis of data.

Consent for publication

All the participants gave their consent for publication of the data.

Authors’ contributions

BM, SM, MZ and AG contributed to the conceptualization and methodology. BM, PB, CB, VT collected the data. BM investigated, analyzed the data and wrote the original draft. PB, AF, AG and SM reviewed and edited the data.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.

Availability of data and materials

All data is accessible by request.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2020.1763085.

Additional information

Funding

The societa' italiana di igiene medicina preventiva e sanita' pubblica financed 1000 euros for communication tools.