Health scares: Professional priorities

Abstract

Currently, many health scholars are concerned about health scares. But what do they mean by the term 'health scare' -are health scares an identifiable phenomenon, and how do we currently understand their causation and consequences? By collecting and analyzing published articles about events considered to be health scares, this paper maps the current views of scholars on their characteristics and causes. Results show that health scares are generally understood as events characterized by fears of catastrophic consequences but little actual mortality. However, the social and economic impacts of these events have often been severe. This survey shows that health scares can be usefully sorted into 6 categories, each with identifiable internal dynamics, suggesting different communications strategies to achieve resolution in each category. Using the social amplification of risk framework, the conditions under which risk signals were amplified were traced in general terms among major stakeholders. Simple causes for health scare events could not be identified, though some triggers did emerge. Importantly, public ignorance of real risk, media scaremongering, and political inaction could be dismissed as primary explanations, though they were sometimes factors in scare events. Implications for risk communication and for future research on risk and public health are discussed. Keywords:Health scare, Social amplification of risk, Expert, Media, Risk controversyIn the age of SARS and 'mad cow' (BSE -bovine spongiform encephalitis) disease, many health professionals in both government and academe worry about what they refer to as 'health scares'. Exactly what these are is, however, unclear. Are they small risks falsely judged as large, as were fluoride additives to water -or alternatively a form of 'health panic' (Moynihan, Heath, and Henry, 2002;Rail and Beausoleil, 2003) or moral panic (Ungar, 2001, McRobbie andThornton, 1995)? The colloquialism seems often to be an umbrella term for a raft of different concerns: sometimes of governments meeting public demands to spend vast sums on protections against negligible risks, and yet at other times of government failure to commit 2 sufficient resources to protect against others risks; of panicky public reactions to media beatups, and yet also of public ignorance of highly damaging risks; of the failure to identify and control the pandemic of influenza feared to be coming, and simultaneously that planning for it will end up costing more than we wish it to in terms of lost revenue, or public mistrust or complacency, or the shunning of particular cultural groups. In particular there are concerns about the enormous political and economic costs of certain scare situations, so disproportionate do they seem when compared to the actual mortality attributable to, for example, SARS or anthrax or 'new variant' Creuzfeld-Jakob disease (nvCJD) (Skinner, 2004).The first aim of this paper is to use the extant literature to work out what scholars mean by the term 'health scare'. Because ther...

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