With the Zika virus in the daily headlines, public health authorities should be looking carefully at how they communicate about this latest emerging infectious disease.
People need to be alerted, not alarmed.
That balance can be hard to strike when the health sources people turn to range from acquaintances on social media to politicians, instead of physicians and other medical professionals.
The Ebola outbreak in 2014 demonstrated that many of the old rules about public health communication no longer apply. Elected officials and media used to turn to professors or government public health officers. Now, headlines can be dominated and people can be swayed by a clever tweet or caustic comment on a talk show, even if they come from someone with no public health expertise.
[For more of this story, written by Doug Levy, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...ublic-health-problem]
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