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Science in crises: harnessing hype
Science in crises: harnessing hype
Lay the groundwork in peace time and be responsive and adaptable when the crisis is unfolding.
This week I had the pleasure of attending part of a University of Otago symposium on infectious diseases and gave a short talk on the role the media can play in communicating risk and uncertainty in times of crisis.
It was a fascinating afternoon, capped off with an excellent public lecture by visiting expert Professor David Heymann covering the decades of work undertaken to identify Ebola, treat its victims and stop its spread.
Professor Heymann’s message was clear – while development of a vaccine for Ebola is a welcome development, what has killed a lot of Ebola victims and exacerbated the spread of the disease is poor hospital processes.
Good communications hygiene
In other words, its the simple stuff that gets you in trouble, like getting too close to patients who might be infected, or not properly sterilising needles. If you get the basic hygiene right, you can limit the spread of infection. Unfortunately, the places prone to Ebola outbreaks often have inadequate medical infrastructure and processes.
For communicating science during crises — like an Ebola outbreak — the same principles apply. The better prepared you are up front, the clearer your key messages are and the more confident your people are in communicating, the less likely fear, uncertainty and misinformation about an outbreak is likely to spread via the media.
My message to the symposium therefore, was that experts need to step up and get better ‘hygiene’ into their science communication practices to help the media do a good job of covering these issues when the public most needs health-related information.
Read the rest of this post, including
my Dos and Don't for communicating science in a crisis, on the SMC blog. SMC Director Peter
Griffin
Science Media Centre NZ
Our aim is to promote accurate, evidence-based reporting on science and technology by helping the media work more closely with the scientific community.
The Science Media Centre is New Zealand's only trusted, independent source of information for the media on all issues related to science. Thousands of news stories providing context from and quoting New Zealand researchers have been published as a direct result of our work.
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