As the health editor of a prominent UK newspaper like The Guardian, Sarah Boseley has often faced the challenge of communicating uncertainty when dealing with health issues. This is even harder in the case of infectious disease outbreaks, when not all the information is always available from the beginning. Nevertheless, media should keep on trying to explain the public that sometimes even scientists and public health authorities have to say: “We don’t know”.
An infectious diseases specialist in London, Geraldine O’Hara spent two months in Sierra Leone with Médecins sans Frontières last year, at the peak of the Ebola crisis. While working in an Ebola treatment centre, she was asked to share her experience on Radio 4, a national radio station in UK. We met her at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, where she told us about how she learnt such a new job and how she realized that real-life stories might greatly improve science communication.
As AIDS taught and TELL ME project highlighted, the risk of stigma in case of an infectious disease can sometimes be very strong. This is an innate reaction to the fear of catching an infection, but it often irrationally widens to discriminate people depending on their ethnicity, origin or job. According to Charlie Cooper, health reporter for The Independent, media can deeply influence the public in this.
ECOM stands for “Effective Communication in Outbreak Management: development of an evidence-based tool for Europe”. The ECOM project is a research project under the EU 7th Framework Programme and runs from February 2012 till February 2016. By bringing together various disciplines, the project aims to go beyond the current knowledge in order to develop an evidence-based behavioural and communication package for health professionals and agencies throughout Europe in case of major outbreaks of infectious diseases.
ECOM's goal is reached through the following specific objectives:
The report published in March 2015 by Medecins sans frontières speaks out clearly against the “global coalition of inaction” and the “vacuum of leadership” in the Ebola crisis in West Africa. Those who were struggling in the field against a huge and out-of-control emergency, without the necessary resources, list the main causes of such a situation: lack of political will, inexperience, and, sometimes, simply fear.
The beginning of the European Immunization Week, which will be followed in a few days by the World Immunization Week, is a perfect chance to remind the importance of vaccination and immunization programme. Among the several initiatives to keep the attention high on such a topic, one involved even the Lego group. Lego ideas is a website developed by the famous Danish toy company where fans may share ideas and proposals for new Lego set. The website allows everyone to post an idea and to gather support.
The World Immunization Week, which will be held from 24-30 April 2015, will signal a renewed global, regional, and national effort to accelerate action to increase awareness and demand for immunization by communities, and improve vaccination delivery services.
Viruses and bacteria are not the only ones to spread during an epidemic. Rumours and misinformation can do that too, eventually leading to the constitution of a parallel information system that could undermine the efficacy of the institutional communication. Similar situations often arise in case of contested knowledge or when only few highly technical experts are left dealing with scientific information.
The Health Department of the European Commission will organise a conference for Member States and partners on lessons to be learned from the Ebola epidemic. The event is organised in close collaboration with the Luxembourg Presidency of the Council and will take place in Mondorf-les-Bains from 12 to 14 October 2015. There will be four sessions, each of them focusing on a specific topic:
The first meeting of the Asset High Level Policy Forum was held in Bruxelles on March 12. The Forum was intended to bring together selected European policy-makers at regional, national and EU levels, key decision makers in health agencies, the pharmaceutical industry, and civil society organisations, in a unique and interactive dialogue to promote on-going reflection on EU strategic priorities about pandemics.
