“You should stick to adopt Healthy habits” every one of you will agree, listening to this from your parents as a child. Growing up each one of us is advised to follow healthy habits to get life in order. However, does adopt healthy habits really helps us? Stick on to the article to get knowledge about it. According to a study, taking precautionary measures or adopting healthy habits leads to a change in the behaviour of human.
“When people take precautionary measures, their behaviour often change as a result,” said Ravi Sundaram.
Ravi Sundaram is an associate professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at the Northeastern University. As observed by Sundaram, people wearing seatbelts usually drive faster, people who have received flu shots may skip washing their hands before eating and those who’ve been vaccinated against sexually transmitted diseases may tend to engage in more risky behavior.
But how do these behavioural changes affect a contagion’s spread when the precaution is not foolproof? This is what was asked by Sundaram and his colleague Rajmohan Rajaraman in journal PLOS ONE. Both of them looked into the cause of fail of influenza vaccine which was 20-40% and the HIV/AIDS antiretroviral which is unsuccessful 25-75% of the time. Considering the stats,
Rajaraman said, “If the level of risky behaviour exceeds a certain threshold, then you arrive at some strange scenarios in which the more you intervene the worse you are making it”.
However, in the case of STDs, risky behaviour is overcome by increased vaccinations but to a limit. But in some of the cases, the risky behaviour outweighs the positive impacts of the vaccine due to the involvement of two individuals. As two individuals are required for successful transmission, both of the individuals ought to be vaccinated. One person’s risky intention will not translate into risky behaviour until the second party is also vaccinated.
The main crux of the research was explained by Sundaram.
He said, “It is that we have to have some kind of behavioural intervention that is coordinated with the medical intervention. So, we tell people to go get a flu shot, but then you also need to accompany it with some kind of behavioural intervention in which you tell people to be aware that it isn’t perfect”.
Priyanka Rawat
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