4. Zika and risk communication

Communication during a public health emergency plays a fundamental role and its main aim is to “empower people to protect themselves from infection”, says Jonh Kinsman, professor at the Epidemiology and Global Health Unit of Umeå University, Sweden. According to Kinsman there are two types of messages to communicate: one, generic, which can be applied anywhere and which are based on universal biological principles; and the other, context-specific messages, aimed at specific aspects in each community. 

The latter are usually more complicated to establish, and “require systematic social research to identify what is happening in a Community.” In fact, “the authorities don’t always understand the issues at local level, and without this understanding these messages may not be understood or accepted.”

Kinsman participates in the ZikaPLAN project, one of the aims of which is to assess how the Brazilian population perceives the information campaigns they receive about Zika. One observation made is that the campaigns are often unbalanced: they are either overpacked with information or they appeal too much to emotion, without informing people properly.

The journalist Mônica Manir studied how news about Zika was treated in the four main Brazilian newspapers. She differentiated three types of discourse. One is the discourse of power: how the government updated figures on the disease while at the same time emphasized in the media the important role of the population in the fight against the virus. Another, the discourse of science: how the reference research centers came to have an unusual role in other times. And, lastly, the discourse of sufferers: that of the mothers (the WHO asked women to consider delaying pregnancy, but in these regions many women live to be mothers”) or that of the affected children, who “in the beginning don’t appear in the newspapers and then later just their backs are shown, until, finally, their faces are shown. That’s when we really assimilate the problem”, said Manir.

Another important aspect is that of media coverage, the number of news stories devoted to the virus. This was at its height during the outbreak, but fell quickly as winter arrived and the mosquito population declined, and hence infection rates.

Laurence Marramahad previously commented that: “we go from one extreme to another. They are either ignored by the media or are totally swamped by them.”