Uncertainty in the media: a mixed picture on swine flu

BMC Public Health is one of those online, open access journals that are becoming more and more prominent in academic publishing. A couple of recent articles throw rather different lights on the communication of health messages to the public. One is pretty positive about how Australian television reported the 2009 swine flu epidemic. The other reports an analysis of school books in Spain, and I'll return to that in another blog entry.

A team from the Universities of Sydney and Canberra looked at the reporting of swine flu (H1N1 influenza) on the news and current affairs broadcasts of five Australian television channels, between April and October 2009. They come to fairly positive conclusions about the reporting, while making suggestions on how it could be improved in similar future situations.

What particularly caught my eye was that the researchers explicitly considered how well uncertainty had been communicated. You probably recall that there was huge uncertainty about how big the epidemic would eventually turn out to be, as indeed is usually the case with such global epidemics. So the message to be got across was quite complicated - the epidemic might be very big, so there had to be preparation for that risk, but on the other hand it might turn out not to be huge. The researchers felt that this uncertainty was got across adequately and appropriately.

The messages on what the public should do about the epidemic threat weren't always so appropriate. The researchers draw attention to the fact that conflicting advice was given - sometimes in the same news bulletin. For instance, in a single bulletin, two different government health authorities said "I think it’s prudent that
all households think about their readiness" and "there is no need at this point for people to start thinking about those preparations…".

What struck me about the examples of advice, quoted in the paper, is that they show little sign of referring to the uncertainty. Presumably the fact that the uncertainty was so great is one reason why the advice was sometimes contradictory. But, judging by the quotations in the paper, most of the advice seems to have been pretty dogmatic - of the "you must do this" or "you really should not do that" kind. It reads rather as if the authorities (and the media reporting them) are perfectly happy in pointing out to the public that there's a lot of uncertainty, but much less happy about trusting the public to take account of that uncertainty when advising them what to do. Doesn't feel quite right to me.