THE GNOSTIC PANDEMIC: VIRTUAL WORSHIP AND THE ECLIPSE OF COMMUNITY IN THE TIME OF COVID-19

One of the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic is the adoption of lockdown policies by national governments to contain the spread of the virus. The two more visible effects on societies are social distancing and the virtualization of social practices. This paper examines some impacts of these phenomena on people's religious preferences. We investigated how the shift from in-person to online congregation was perceived by Catholic and Protestant believers. Our results show that the Protestant world felt the lack of community more than the Catholic. Within Catholicism, people who attended more religious services before the lockdown seemed to have less notice of the difference between online and in-person worship. The tendency to virtual congregation appears to bring back Catholics to Gnosticism, meaning a religion too focused on spirituality and knowledge to the detriment of corporality and community. Significantly, priests and nuns resisted this tendency within Catholicism. © 2022 Vita e Pensiero. All rights reserved.

Worldwide use of HPV self-sampling for cervical cancer screening.

An increasing body of evidence supports the validity of self-sampling as an alternative to clinician collection for primary Human Papillomavirus (HPV) screening. Self-sampling effectively reaches underscreened women and can be a powerful strategy in low- and high-resource settings for all target ages. This work aims to summarize the current use of HPV self-sampling worldwide. It is part of a larger project that describes cervical cancer screening programmes and produces standardized coverage estimates worldwide. A systematic review of the literature and official documents supplemented with a formal World Health Organisation country consultation was conducted. Findings show that the global use of HPV self-sampling is still limited. Only 17 (12%) of countries with identified screening programs recommend its use, nine as the primary collection method, and eight to reach underscreened populations. We identified 10 pilots evaluating the switch to self-sampling in well-established screening programs. The global use of self-sampling is likely to increase in the coming years. COVID-19's pandemic has prompted efforts to accelerate HPV self-sampling introduction globally, and it is now considered a key element in scaling up screening coverage. The information generated by the early experiences can be beneficial for decision-making in both new and existing programs.