IHEP-supported work sparks new NFRF-funded project advancing response to health misinformation 

Interdisciplinary collaboration supported by the Institute of Health Emergencies & Pandemics (IHEP) has helped catalyze a new interdisciplinary project that has received funding through the Exploration stream of the Government of Canada’s New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF). The program supports high-risk, high-reward research that brings novel approaches to complex challenges.

Led by Principal Investigator Zahra Shakeri (Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation of Dalla Lana School of Public Health), the funded project, PROOF-Health: Provenance-first, retrieval-only agents for detecting high-harm health misinformation, will develop new methods to identify and mitigate the spread of harmful health claims.

IHEP members involved in the project include Brian Baigrie (Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology), Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed (Department of Computer Science), Colin Furness and Nadia Caidi, (both Faculty of Information), and external member, Daniel Barnett (Johns Hopkins University). They are joined by co-applicants, Maya Goldenberg (University of Guelph), Neil Seeman and Blair Bigham (University of Toronto). Their work responds to a growing challenge: health misinformation spreads quickly, often faster than experts can respond, particularly on social media and in multilingual or under-served communities.

PROOF-Health will address this gap by developing an early warning system that identifies high-risk claims, reduces public exposure and saves valuable response time. The project will track emerging health claims and trace their spread across platforms, including through altered or synthetic content.

It will also produce clear, evidence-based “cards” grounded in trusted sources to explain risks and support timely public health responses. Pilot studies will test the system’s ability to provide earlier alerts and reduce exposure, with a focus on accessibility, equity and diverse audiences.

At its core, PROOF-Health takes a different approach to tackling misinformation: instead of generating new content, it focuses on finding and verifying existing information to assess risk.

Bringing together expertise from public health, AI, information science and policy, the project includes built-in safeguards to support responsible use. In addition to a working prototype, the team will produce open tools and datasets to support wider efforts to combat health misinformation in Canada and beyond.

As Shakeri notes, “Health misinformation is not an abstract problem. It changes clinical decisions, slows public health response and deepens inequities. With PROOF Health, we are trying to move the response earlier, before harmful claims become entrenched.”