Emergency risk communication and sensemaking during smoke events: A survey of practitioners.

Emergency risk communication (ERC) for smoke emitted from major fires continues to challenge governments. During these events, practitioners (including scientific, communication, and emergency response government staff) are tasked with quickly making sense of the public health risks and the communication options available. Practitioners' sensemaking-the process of creating meaning from information about an unfolding emergency-is key to effective ERC.

Changed priorities ahead: Journalists' shifting role perceptions when covering public health crises.

Journalistic role perceptions have been extensively studied in general contexts, but little is known as to how roles - or role prioritization - may shift across contexts, and professional characteristics. The aim of this study was gaining an understanding of journalists' changing role perceptions in health crisis coverage, and moreover to examine potential differences between general and specialist reporters. We conducted 22 in-depth interviews with reporters with experience in health crisis reporting in Germany and Finland.

Fear-Mongering or Fact-Driven? Illuminating the Interplay of Objective Risk and Emotion-Evoking Form in the Response to Epidemic News.

This study examined the veracity of the common assumption that news coverage of epidemic outbreaks spawns heightened fears and risk perceptions. An online experiment with 1,324 participants investigated the interplay of the form of news coverage (factual/emotion-laden) and key aspects of actual risk (low/high vulnerability, low/high severity) on audience responses. Participants read one of eight versions of a newspaper article followed by measures on risk perceptions, negative affect, behavioral intentions, and perceived sensationalism.

"Pandemic Public Health Paradox": Time Series Analysis of the 2009/10 Influenza A / H1N1 Epidemiology, Media Attention, Risk Perception and Public Reactions in 5 European Countries.

In 2009, influenza A H1N1 caused the first pandemic of the 21st century. Although a vaccine against this influenza subtype was offered before or at the onset of the second epidemic wave that caused most of the fatal cases in Europe, vaccination rates for that season were lower than expected. We propose that the contradiction between high risk of infection and low use of available prevention measures represents a pandemic public health paradox.