Multifactor Quality and Safety Analysis of Semaglutide Products Sold by Online Sellers Without a Prescription: Market Surveillance, Content Analysis, and Product Purchase Evaluation Study.

Background: Over the past 4 decades, obesity has escalated into a global epidemic, with its worldwide prevalence nearly tripling. Pharmacological treatments have evolved with the recent development of glucagon-like peptide 1 agonists, such as semaglutide. However, off-label use of drugs such as Ozempic for cosmetic weight loss has surged in popularity, raising concerns about potential misuse and the emergence of substandard and falsified products in the unregulated supply chain.

Search Engines and Generative Artificial Intelligence Integration: Public Health Risks and Recommendations to Safeguard Consumers Online.

Background: The online pharmacy market is growing, with legitimate online pharmacies offering advantages such as convenience and accessibility. However, this increased demand has attracted malicious actors into this space, leading to the proliferation of illegal vendors that use deceptive techniques to rank higher in search results and pose serious public health risks by dispensing substandard or falsified medicines. Search engine providers have started integrating generative artificial intelligence (AI) into search engine interfaces, which could revolutionize search by delivering more personalized results through a user-friendly experience.

Unsupervised Machine Learning to Detect and Characterize Barriers to Pre-exposure Prophylaxis Therapy: Multiplatform Social Media Study.

Background: Among racial and ethnic minority groups, the risk of HIV infection is an ongoing public health challenge. Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is highly effective for preventing HIV when taken as prescribed. However, there is a need to understand the experiences, attitudes, and barriers of PrEP for racial and ethnic minority populations and sexual minority groups.

Multifactor Quality and Safety Analysis of Antimicrobial Drugs Sold by Online Pharmacies That Do Not Require a Prescription: Multiphase Observational, Content Analysis, and Product Evaluation Study.

Background: Antimicrobial resistance is a significant global public health threat. However, the impact of sourcing potentially substandard and falsified antibiotics via the internet remains understudied, particularly in the context of access to and quality of common antibiotics. In response, this study conducted a multifactor quality and safety analysis of antibiotics sold and purchased via online pharmacies that did not require a prescription.

Test, Trace, and Put on the Blockchain?: A Viewpoint Evaluating the Use of Decentralized Systems for Algorithmic Contact Tracing to Combat a Global Pandemic.

The enormous pressure of the increasing case numbers experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic has given rise to a variety of novel digital systems designed to provide solutions to unprecedented challenges in public health. The field of algorithmic contact tracing, in particular, an area of research that had previously received limited attention, has moved into the spotlight as a crucial factor in containing the pandemic. The use of digital tools to enable more robust and expedited contact tracing and notification, while maintaining privacy and trust in the data generated, is viewed as key to identifying chains of transmission and close contacts, and, consequently, to enabling effective case investigations.

Combating Health Care Fraud and Abuse: Conceptualization and Prototyping Study of a Blockchain Antifraud Framework.

Background: An estimated US $2.6 billion loss is attributed to health care fraud and abuse. With traditional health care claims verification and reimbursement, the health care provider submits a claim after rendering services to a patient, which is then verified and reimbursed by the payer.

Big Data, Natural Language Processing, and Deep Learning to Detect and Characterize Illicit COVID-19 Product Sales: Infoveillance Study on Twitter and Instagram.

Background: The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic is perhaps the greatest global health challenge of the last century. Accompanying this pandemic is a parallel "infodemic," including the online marketing and sale of unapproved, illegal, and counterfeit COVID-19 health products including testing kits, treatments, and other questionable "cures." Enabling the proliferation of this content is the growing ubiquity of internet-based technologies, including popular social media platforms that now have billions of global users.

An Interdisciplinary Review of Surgical Data Recording Technology Features and Legal Considerations.

Surgical data recording technology has great promise to generate patient safety and quality data that can be utilized to potentially reduce medical errors. Variations of these systems aim to improve surgical technique, develop better training simulation, and promote adverse event investigation similar to the aims of black box technology utilized in other industries. However, many unknowns remain for surgical data recording utilization in operating rooms and clinical settings in the United States.

Establishing a Link Between Prescription Drug Abuse and Illicit Online Pharmacies: Analysis of Twitter Data.

Background: Youth and adolescent non-medical use of prescription medications (NUPM) has become a national epidemic. However, little is known about the association between promotion of NUPM behavior and access via the popular social media microblogging site, Twitter, which is currently used by a third of all teens.

Objective: In order to better assess NUPM behavior online, this study conducts surveillance and analysis of Twitter data to characterize the frequency of NUPM-related tweets and also identifies illegal access to drugs of abuse via online pharmacies.

Emerging ethical issues in digital health information.

The problems of poor or biased information and of misleading health and well-being advice on the Internet have been extensively documented. The recent decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to authorize a large number of new generic, top-level domains, including some with a clear connection to health or healthcare, presents an opportunity to bring some order to this chaotic situation. In the case of the most general of these domains, ".

Health domains for sale: the need for global health Internet governance.

A debate on Internet governance for health, or "eHealth governance", is emerging with the impending award of a new dot-health (.health) generic top-level domain name (gTLD) along with a host of other health-related domains. This development is critical as it will shape the future of the health Internet, allowing largely unrestricted use of .

Why the MDGs need good governance in pharmaceutical systems to promote global health.

Background: Corruption in the health sector can hurt health outcomes. Improving good governance can in turn help prevent health-related corruption. We understand good governance as having the following characteristics: it is consensus-oriented, accountable, transparent, responsive, equitable and inclusive, effective and efficient, follows the rule of law, is participatory and should in theory be less vulnerable to corruption.

Global reach of direct-to-consumer advertising using social media for illicit online drug sales.

Background: Illicit or rogue Internet pharmacies are a recognized global public health threat that have been identified as utilizing various forms of online marketing and promotion, including social media.

Objective: To assess the accessibility of creating illicit no prescription direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) online pharmacy social media marketing (eDTCA2.0) and evaluate its potential global reach.