Some things just do not want to die. In public health, anti-vaccination movements keep sizzling debates, just as they did in the XIX century. At the same time, the “deficit model” of science communication – the myth that the “public” is just ignorant and that it would support science, if spoon-fed information from the ivory tower – still haunts the relationship between health, science and the community, despite having been repeatedly debunked. The two zombies are more related than one could believe. Vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaccination movements grow in the cracks between trust and knowledge, and these are the fault lines that communication should heal – or rip apart, if it fails.
How many ways are there to communicate science in society today? New and promising communication opportunities are rising fast, thanks to different media: web, social networks, graphic journalism like the webcomic strip dedicated to the potential public health issue represented by Zika during the Olympic Games in Brazil 2016 and even a board game like Pandemic Legacy.
The third edition of the ASSET Summer School will be held at the National Centre for Diseases Prevention and Health Promotion (CNaPPS) of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS) in Rome from May 30 to June 1, 2017. Pandemics (or more in general public health emergencies of international concern, PHEIC) as well as other major infectious disease outbreaks management do necessarily require a multidisciplinary approach. The ASSET Summer School focuses on
Effective science communication, especially when engaging with genuine two-way discussions with audiences, is quite a complex issue, and far from simple to study. Much of what works and what doesn’t is highly dependent on contingent factors, from what specifically is being communicated, to the social dynamics around the issues, to the political context in which the engagement occurs. This makes deriving general insights and lessons that can be applied across the board particularly challenging.
A change in the attitude towards science, coming from an understanding of its limits, interferes with people’s trust towards vaccination. Hesitancy and refusal in this field have their roots in a relationship between science and society that is different from what it used to be. A great role in this is played by media, which are somehow forced to publish what people want to hear and read, despite scientific evidence, in order to make profit, or just to survive.
In recent years – mainly thanks to the communicative dynamics of the web – drawings, graphs and visualizations have become a powerful way to spread news and information. Social networks are overflowed by memes and animated gifs, and several journals, both digital and paper, make use of infographic to depict concepts and information revealed by large amount of data.
