Vaccines save lives, so why do some parents prefer not to get their children vaccinated against deadly diseases? It seems the ideas of purity and liberty have a big influence.

Avnika Amin at Emory University, Georgia, and her team surveyed more than 1000 adults in the US who had at least one child aged 12 or younger. They assessed the parents’ attitudes towards vaccinations, as well as how much emphasis they put on each of six moral values: authority, fairness, harm, loyalty, purity and liberty. These values are all known to affect judgement and decision-making. “We thought it might be interesting to see if maybe these intuitive values were associated with health decisions,” says Amin.

The team found that 73 per cent of parents got low scores when it was assessed whether they have concerns about vaccinations, but 11 per cent showed some hesitancy around vaccinations, and 16 per cent were highly hesitant.

Compared with those who weren’t very worried, the medium hesitancy parents were twice as likely to place a high emphasis on purity as a moral value. And high hesitancy parents were twice as likely to emphasise purity and liberty, but half as likely to stress authority, compared with low hesitancy parents.

When the team looked at the claims made on anti-vaccination websites, they found that these often appeal to the same moral values.

Appeal to liberty

A better understanding of how moral values affect vaccination attitudes could help public health officials show parents that childhood vaccinations are actually in line with certain values, says Amin.

For example, for those who see liberty as important, a doctor could stress that vaccination is a way to exercise a parent’s freedom in taking control of their child’s health. “We’re not out to change what people value,” says Amin, “but let’s work with those values to show that we’re on the same side.”

“I think the ideas here are really quite novel,” says at the University of California, Riverside. He says we now need to test different types of messaging geared towards these values to see if they can actually change vaccination attitudes.

Processing speed

Brief intervention

Love sea urchin? Then grow your ownĚýfake version at home. Recently, we’ve seen big research labs growing hamburgers and , but now the Shojinmeat Project in Japan is teaching people how to do it themselves at home.

The project has attracted a wide swathe of people, includingĚýhigh school students culturing sea shells in their refrigerators, and a woman who works at a fish market by day and cultures sea urchin by night. Another group recently grew a small piece of foie gras that they split six ways. “The problem was that none of us were rich enough to know the taste of the real thing,” says Shojinmeat founder Yuki Hanyu. But it certainly wasn’t bad, he says: the foie gras had a lot of umami flavour with a little sweetness. “It definitely tasted like food.”

Culturing meat at home can be more environmentally friendly and doesn’t involve killing an animal. Whether it’s grown in a commercial laboratory or in someone’s home kitchen, culturing meat requires the same basic ingredients:Ěýsome cells from the type of meat you want to grow, an edible structure for them to grow around, and something to nourish them with. The rest is improvisation. The Shojinmeat teamĚýwas surprised to findĚýthat some cells grow well when a portion of their nutrients are provided by sports drinks.

“I think we’re really in an interesting time,” says , a physiology professor at North Carolina State University. The success of the project will depend on how much support is provided, he says.

Shojinmeat have now released instructions on how to build a small bioreactor for culturing meat at home and has also published a cultured meat recipe online. It will probably be a while before cultured meat shows up in our grocery stores, but Shojinmeat is letting people explore that future now. “I would say the dream cultured meat for me would be a nice psoas major steak with exactly the same flavor profile [as the original],” says Mozdziak. “And then after that, we try dinosaur.”

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Dual-purpose

Back in August, Donald Trump announced that he intended to declare the US opioid crisis – which is killing tens of thousands of people a year – a national emergency. Now he’s done it.

“Effective today, my administration is officially declaring the opioid crisis a national public health emergency under federal law, and why I am directing all executive agencies to use every appropriate emergency authority to fight the opioid crisis,” on 26 October, before signing a presidential memorandum.

The directive calls for increased access to telemedicine in rural areas with doctor shortages, a shuffling of federal funding so more can be applied to the crisis, and some easing of regulations and bureaucratic delays that could otherwise slow down efforts.

However, because the emergency was declared through the Public Health Services Act, it doesn’t automatically come with any additional funding, and President Trump hasn’t yet requested any.

Rather than pushing for emergency aid that could be used to directly help those already suffering from opioid addictions, Trump discussed ways the US could prevent use to begin with.

Advertising effort

The president suggested that targeted advertising campaigns could curtail opioid use. “The fact is, if we can teach young people — and people, generally – not to start, it’s really, really easy not to take them,” he said. “Really tough, really big, really great advertising, so we get to people before they start, so they don’t have to go through the problems of what people are going through.”

He also said that because a significant portion of opioids entering the country come from Latin America, his proposed border wall would boost efforts. “We will be building a wall which will greatly help in this problem,” he said.Ěý“It will have a great impact.”

But the opioid crisis is not only an illegal drug problem – large numbers of people have become addicted to opioids through painkillers prescribed to them by physicians.

Many haveĚýsaid that the lack of additional federal funds will greatly limit what the directive can actually accomplish. In a , Senator Bernie Sanders said, “Trump is right that the opioid crisis is a national emergency. Unfortunately, his announcement today was nothing more than an empty promise.”

Read more: Chronic back pain stem cell treatment could cut need for opioids

Medical applications

Watch the cost. People are more likely to experience stronger side effects when a treatmentĚýappears to be more expensive, according to a study of the nocebo effect.

While the placebo effect means that some people feel better when they have unknowingly been given a sham or control treatment, the nocebo works the opposite way. Researchers frequently observe nocebo effects in clinical trials, when people who receive a placebo experience negative side effects as if they had been given an actual drug.

Placebos are known to have stronger positive effects the more expensive the person receiving them believes them to be. , at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, and her colleagues wondered if price might also affect the strength of the nocebo effect.

The team created two packages for fake creams and told volunteers that they are used to treat itchy skin. One package looked like an expensive pharmaceutical brand name, while the other looked like a cheaper, generic medication.

The participants were shown one of the two creams and told that it was believed to increase a person’s sensitivity to pain as a side effect.

Pain sensitivity

The team then applied creams to participants’ arms, and exposed their limbs to increasing levels of heat. Each person was asked to rank the discomfort they felt.

The participants given the more expensive-looking cream reported more pain than those given the cheaper-looking cream. Relative to a control cream that was described as having no active ingredients, the generic-looking cream raised pain on average by around 3 per cent, while the expensive-looking cream increased pain by nearly 30 per cent.

The finding confirms that the price of a treatment effects not only placebo strength, but nocebo power too.

During the pain test, the team collected fMRI images of the brain, brainstem and spinal cord. They found that activity in a particular area of the prefrontal cortex and a region called the periaqueductal gray varied depending on what cream had been given. Both these areas are part of the neural pain pathway, and have also been implicated in mediating placebo effects.

The findings may help refine how doctors nurses and pharmacists talk to patients about medications, enabling them to try to minimize the nocebo effect, says Tinnermann.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aan1221

Read more: Tap the placebo effect to unlock your body’s healing powers

One-off treatment

US legislation that protects some immigrants from deportation has been good for the mental health of their children. But the programme is under threat, with president Donald Trump expected to announce whether he will scrap it next week.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) programme was introduced by president Barack Obama in 2012. It provides undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the US before 2007 as children with work permits and protection from deportation.

To investigate how immigration status can affect a person’s family, at Stanford University and his colleagues have been using data from Oregon’s Emergency Medicaid programme, a healthcare scheme predominantly used by undocumented immigrants.

The researchers analysed data linked to more than 5600 mothers who used Emergency Medicaid between 2003 and 2015, splitting them into two groups – those whose birthdates made them eligible for DACA protections, and those born just before the June 1981 cut-off. They then analysed mental health diagnoses across the women’s 8610 children, who are all US citizens by birth.

Dramatic drop

The team found that 7.8 per cent of children whose mothers were not eligible for DACA were diagnosed during the study period with adjustment or anxiety disorders – mental health issues often affected by external stresses, such as the threat of a parent being deported.

But only 3.3 per cent of children with mothers eligible for DACA protections were diagnosed with the same disorders.

“The fact that it reduced by over 50 per cent is really astonishing,” says at Montclair State University in New Jersey. “It shows that this policy can have huge impacts on the life of an entire family.”

Hainmueller says that his team was surprised by the large drop in diagnoses. “I think this is the clearest causal evidence we have that this undocumented status of the parents can really be a significant barrier to the normal development of the children,” he says.

The team is now doing similar analyses with data from other states, including California and New York. But DACA’s days may be numbered. Trump was critical of the programme during his election campaign last year, and has until 5 September to decide whether he will dissolve it.

Journal reference: Science, DOI:

Read more: The truth about migration