The Fear Factor
Preparing the public for a major disaster like pandemic flu without inciting panic is tricky. But the truth goes a long way
Panic. For instance, public officials often presume that people will panic when told of impending disaster. So they overdo their efforts to reassure them, which paradoxically prompts people to panic. During the disastrous 1918 flu pandemic, which killed at least 50 million people worldwide, U.S. officials were obsessed with preserving morale and never publicly acknowledged that the deadly flu outbreaks posed a danger. Near anarchy ensued, with people afraid to go to work or tend to the sick. Dead bodies were left in the streets, and orphans were abandoned. "You will only get panic if people lose faith in their own authorities," says Baruch Fischhoff, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University who researches risk communication. "They'll lose faith much quicker if the authorities don't level with them."
That lesson has been hard for nations to learn, even in recent times. In 2003, for example, Chinese officials scrambled to hide reports of a pneumonialike outbreak in Guangdong province. Their secretiveness is widely thought to have given the SARS virus time to spread beyond China, eventually infecting 8,000 people, killing 800, and bringing the Asian economy to a standstill. In October 2001, Tommy Thompson, then secretary of HHS, told an American public still reeling from 9/11 that a Florida man's anthrax infection appeared to be "an isolated case," perhaps contracted by drinking from a stream. Four more people died; the U.S. Capitol was shut down, and people swamped doctors' offices seeking the antibiotic Cipro. Even when no one is harmed, risk-communication failures destroy trust. Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security, will be forever remembered for the department's widely mocked color-coded terror alerts. "The public can generally tolerate much higher levels of alarm than politicians imagine," says Peter Sandman, a Rutgers University professor and risk communications consultant.
Misunderstanding. Risk is a subjective concept. People are usually more worried about risks that are new, unfair, or forced upon them--say, having a toxic-waste dump put next to their home. But people tend to get less upset about risks that are familiar or that they take on of their own volition, like smoking or driving on the interstate. These mundane risks cause far more illness, injury, and death than all toxic-waste sites combined. Armed with data, some risk analysts call those kinds of responses irrational, revealing a yawning gulf of misunderstanding between technocrats and those in harm's way. "The tendency to say the public disagrees because they're ignorant is not fair or correct," says Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon and a pioneer in studying risk perception. "Risk lives in our minds not just as calculations but as feelings. That's how we navigate through life."
Finding out how people feel about a distressing subject like pandemic flu, Slovic says, is critical if you want them to listen. Scientists, unfortunately, are inclined to think of communication as a science lesson: how avian flu could mutate into a form that would easily infect humans, say, or how nuclear power plants are constructed. The intended audience may be thinking something far different. With Hurricane Katrina, for example, many people refused to evacuate not because they didn't think the hurricane could be deadly but because they didn't want to leave their pets behind.
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