Bird
flu: the role of science journalists
David
Dickson
24
October 2005
Science
and Development Network
As
prospects grow of a global flu pandemic, it is important for governments to
recognise that responsible science journalism can play a significant role in
limiting its impact. It
would be difficult to imagine a better example of the need for responsible
science journalism than avian influenza, or 'bird flu'. Health officials across
the world warn that the H5N1 virus could spark a global pandemic of human flu
that, many are already predicting, could cost million of lives. It is already becoming clear that
effectively communicating accurate information about the disease will be
essential to efforts to contain it.
Of
course, health and veterinary officials need sound information with which to
plan their responses, while governments need an accurate picture of both the
nature of the disease and the way it spreads if they are to make sensible
decisions about the size and allocation of the resources, both financial and
human, needed to combat it.
But it is just as important that the public is
equally well informed. There are a number of practical reasons for this. It is
important, for instance, to know that cooking food properly appears to destroy
the virus and that washing hands before preparing food also helps avoid
infection.
There are also strong political reasons for communicating reliable
information effectively, particularly if politicians are not to feel pressurised
into over-reacting.
Panic measures
seldom make good public policy. They are frequently taken when a threat is
poorly understood, either by those taking the decision, or by those on whose
behalf it is made. They can have disastrous effects, ranging from the excessive
and inappropriate use of scarce resources, to ineffectiveness if aimed at the
wrong targets.
Political
responsibility
The need for clear and sound information
about bird flu is obvious if such reactions are to be avoided. Government
officials clearly have a responsibility to ensure that this takes place. But in
an era of widespread distrust of public institutions, this is no longer
sufficient.
Equally, if not more, important, is the role of journalists
and the media.
The
task is made both more important and more difficult when official organisations
seek, for reasons of their own, to place a 'spin' on the information they
present. Last year, for example, we criticised the behaviour of governments in
Asia that were restricting the information they divulged about bird flu
outbreaks sometimes even denying that outbreaks had occurred (see Bird flu: the communication
challenge).
More recently a new culprit has emerged, namely the temptation by
international agencies, perhaps keen to squeeze extra funding from reluctant
donors, to overstate the size of potential problems they are likely to face. Last month, for example, the World Health
Organization issued a hurried correction after its top official responsible for
handling the bird flu crisis, David Nabarro, told the media that the diseases
could cause "between five and 150 million deaths", comparing the challenge to
that of a combination of climate change and HIV/AIDS. The following day, the
agency clarified the statement to say that its estimate of the number of people
who could die was "between two million and 7.4 million".
It
is not the only recent occasion on which this has happened. Earlier this year,
the same WHO official was widely quoted as predicting that the number of people
who might die from disease particularly from cholera after the tsunami in
the Indian
Ocean
could be twice the number killed by the tsunami itself.
This prediction
proved to be widely off the mark. In the event, those displaced by the tsunami
soon left the temporary refugee camps in which they had been living and whose
conditions had given rise to this prediction and the spread of disease was
kept well under control.
Public
assessment of risk
Both
instances, as well as many other recent less controversial examples, illustrate
the challenges that science and health
journalists face in meeting their responsibilities. Central to their task is
conveying accurate information, not only about the nature of the disease itself,
but also about the way in which it is spreading. Individual communities are,
legitimately, concerned to know whether they are at risk, and if so, what the
nature of that risk is, and what they can do about it. In such situations, undue
alarm caused by faulty information can do much damage. The key responsibility of
journalists is or at least should be to ensure that the information it
disseminates is as accurate as it can be in the circumstances. This does not
mean that it has to be scientifically proven. But it does mean that what is
being described must be consistent with what is either known and proven, or
considered by those most familiar with the field to be likely.
This does not always mean trusting the
scientists. Britain's experience with BSE commonly known as mad cow disease
provides a morality tale in the hazards involved when scientists are reluctant
to acknowledge the limits of their knowledge, particularly when they are
government scientists employed by a department keen to protect the interests of
British farmers.
What
it does mean, however, is that in order to cover stories such as bird flu
effectively, science and health journalists must be able to probe beneath the
surface of what they are being told to judge the robustness of the information
they are being given.
Critical
need for informed journalism
Being sceptical about official statements,
although often justified, is not enough. Equally necessary is the ability to
discriminate between statements that are based on sound information and those
that are not. Even the WHO's 'official' figure of "up to 7.4 million deaths
world-wide" smacks of spurious accuracy, given the many uncertainties that
continue to exist about the exact size of the bird flu threat to humans.
Such
issues have been receiving increasing attention in the developed world over the
past two decades, as governments realise that public perceptions of risk are as
important as the 'scientific' measure of the same risk in getting their policies
accepted. As a result, factors that affect public perceptions, such as trust (or
lack thereof) in political institutions, need to be taken into account when
forming effective policies.
One of the messages of the bird flu crisis is
that these issues are no less important
in the developing world. Indeed the argument can be made that a lack of both
medical and scientific infrastructure, lowers the ability of governments to meet
the challenge of a rapidly spreading epidemic and makes effective public
communication even more important.
Remember
the lessons of HIV/AIDS in Africa.
Countries which have been most effective in combating the disease are not the
ones with the most sophisticated medical infrastructures, but those, such as
Uganda, that have been most open in communicating about the disease. In others,
such as South
Africa,
where political leaders have been in partial denial about the threat of HIV,
official policies have been skewed.
History
must not be allowed to repeat itself. To avoid this, transparency needs to be
the first order of the day. Governments have no excuse to hide information
either from their own populations, or from other governments and international
agencies that are seeking to combat the disease.
But
a commitment to transparency on its own is insufficient. Equally important is
the need to ensure that those in the front-line of public communication namely
science and health journalists have adequate tools and skills to perform their
task, for example to detect when a commitment to transparency is not being
observed. As the threat of bird flu rises up the agenda of governments around
the world, this need must be given the priority that it
requires.
