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Ebola

Voices: We must separate fact from fiction on health

Peter J. Hotez
Special for USA TODAY
A hazardous materials worker moves a barrel as he finishes cleaning around the apartment building of a hospital worker infected with the Ebola virus on Oct. 12, 2014, in Dallas.

When it comes to reporting on scary infectious diseases, our nation's news media sometimes fail to distinguish between genuine threats and perceived or even imaginary ones. Because virtually all of our health information now comes from television, radio newspapers and the digital world, these miscues can have serious consequences, especially for vulnerable populations like our children.

That's why it's critical that we scientists and physicians take greater responsibility for communicating effectively with the American people.

A recent example of a perceived threat to the U.S. was the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Every day in October, I emphasized to journalists how understanding the science of virus transmission could make clear that Ebola infection would never produce an epidemic in the U.S. as it did in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Instead of threatening the general public, Ebola was a risk for U.S. health care workers taking care of seriously ill and infected patients.

It was a complex message that many journalists took the time to understand and report. But others got it right only after needlessly spreading widespread public panic. That triggered some unfortunate decisions by several governors, who overreacted and made bad policy moves that had no scientific basis.

The 2015 measles outbreak spotlights an opposite media response.

While Ebola was never going to threaten the U.S. public, the major preventable childhood diseases — measles, pneumococcal and Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) pneumonia/meningitis and rotavirus enteritis — remain the great killers of children everywhere. They are constant threats to the U.S.

I'm part of an initiative known as the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study that counts the number of deaths from different diseases all over the world. In 1990, the GBD estimated that almost 2 million children under the age of five died from these four diseases.

And then a miracle occurred – the miracle of vaccines.Through an international effort led by the GAVI Alliance, which included the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the Gates Foundation and other agencies, by 2013 that number had been reduced 70% to under 600,000 deaths . The only reason for this success: Across the planet, children were aggressively immunized against measles, pneumococcus, Hib and rotavirus.

But the U.S. media seldom told that story. Instead, there was mostly silence. Silence that allowed fringe groups to disseminate false claims about vaccines and their alleged links to autism. Despite a total absence of scientific credibility or even plausibility given what we know about the genetics of autism, parents began mobilizing against vaccines, often lobbying state legislatures to allow so-called personal belief exemptions for their children.

So now we have a mess. With significant percentages of children unimmunized in some of our most populated states, including California and Texas, we have unprecedented numbers of children who are vulnerable to killer infections. This is not unexpected; the U.S. had warnings based on smaller previous outbreaks of measles, which is the most contagious of all the killer infections.

The media are not entirely to blame for the confusion. In many instances, our nation's public health leaders have not spoken out on vaccinations, and until last week we have not had a recent U.S. president telling American parents to vaccinate their kids.

I believe we scientists and physicians need to do a much better job getting the message out to the public and the media. Our failure to do so is one reason the U.S. public overreacted to Ebola last fall and continues to underreact to the real infectious disease threats facing us now.

Communicating public health threats to the American public requires a closer partnership among the communities of scientists, physicians and journalists. It will take new approaches and hard work. But it can be done.

Hotez is dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine

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