Medicine & Health
Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions: The Internet’s Role in the COVID-19 Pandemic By Robert Rampani
Figure 1. The Safer Ways App updates with real time information about COVID-19 guideline compliance
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hat do psychology, public health, tobacco control policy, the Internet, and the COVID-19 pandemic all have in common? These topics all fuse together to form the research and passions of Dr. Kurt M. Ribisl, a Jo Anne Earp Distinguished Professor in the Department of Health Behavior at the UNC Gillings School of Public Health. Dr. Ribisl has spent the majority of his adult research life investigating and recommending practices, procedures, and systems to help “evaluat[e] and improv[e] populationlevel efforts to reduce tobacco use with a particular emphasis on policy and information technology.”1 This has manifested in numerous ways throughout his career, from a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, to currently being the Chair of the Department of Health Behavior at the UNC Gillings School of Public Health, and being a CoFounder of Counter Tools. Counter Tools is a nonprofit focused on drawing “on the best available science and an evidence-based model of change to help… partners reduce the impact of products that harm the health of individuals and communities.”2 Today, Dr. Ribisl teaches about health behavior at UNC, and conducts research that is influenced by his experience in combining multiple disciplines of interest. While reducing tobacco use and encouraging proper health behavior to reduce the spread of COVID-19 may seem like different goals, some of the same underlying principles apply in both preventative measures. Both, in essence, are collective issues that need to be addressed on a large scale. As Dr. Ribisl expressed, “medicine [and] psychology [are] focused on individuals, where public health has a bigger focus on a population approach.”3 The fusion of the
individual, psychological approach and a more collective, populational-behavioral approach is a key tenant of Dr. Ribisl’s work. This interdisciplinary focus, both on tobacco research and now looking at the effects and shortcomings of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, has yielded an unprecedented level of success. One major success has been in the area of warning labels for tobacco products. Dr. Ribisl has worked extensively with members of the psychological, communication, visual design, and medical communities to create warnings that explicitly inform and dissuade consumers from using products detrimental to their health (Figure 2).
Kurt M. Ribisl, PhD.
The Internet is another area that links the fight against tobacco and the pandemic. Dr. Ribisl has been investigating the use of the Internet for decades; during his time teaching the class “The Internet & Public Health” at
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