Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
2009 flu pandemic• The 2009 flu pandemic or swine flu was an influenza pandemic involving
H1N1 influenza virus
• Starting at the spring of 2009 until spring of 2010
• Approx. 10-200 million people infected, 280000 dead (18500 death are proven to be connected to the pandemic)
• In Hungary 134 death are connected to the pandemic, 5 pregnant women
• 16% of pregnant women got vaccinated in Hungary, contrary to the 95% in Stockholm (Czeizel, 2011)
• 0.03 mortality rate - contrary to the 100 times higher mortality rate of the 1918 flu pandemic
Role of media• Front page coverage almost every day since the identification and fast
spread of the virus
• Research of these articles looking for the signs of biased opinion, sensationalism or political interests
• One-year long monitoring of eight British newspaper (Hilton & Hunt, 2011, Medical Research Council)
• Newspapers categorized as ‚serious’, ‚middle-market tabloid’ and ‚tabloid’
• Articles categorized as ‚alarmist’, ‚reassuring’ or ‚neither’
• 5647 articles containing the phrase ‚H1N1’, 1.93 articles/newspaper/day (incl Sundays)
Number of published papers during the pandemic
Content of articles• Changes over time:
• Beginning: global effects of the pandemic
• Later: national morbidity
• First deaths: status of the pandemic in the UK
• Most of the papers were neither reassuring or alarming
• One third of people used some kind of prevention
• Hardly half of them would vaccinated themselves
• Disappearance of articles on the pandemic calmed people
Representation of the pandemic globally
• Review of papers investigating the representation of the 2009 flu pandemic in media analyzed European, Chinese, American and Australian newspapers and TV-chanels (Klemm et al, 2014)
• Investigated if media dramatized the situation
• Most paper were factual, not dramatized
• Most papers were about the threat of the pandemic with less attention to prevention and the effect of counter-measures
•As a possible consequence, people did not react properly to the pandemic
Reaction in Hungarian media
• One thesis at (Horváth, 2010, Corvinus University) investigated the articles related to the pandemic published in the two largest Hungarian national daily newspapers
• No statistics were used to confirm/reject the hypotheses
• Two characteristics specific to Hungarian articles:
• Role of the MDs and specialists shifted to politicians over time
• The pandemic and the countermeasures taken became the subject of internal political debates (elections were held on the spring of 2010)
Opinions about the vaccination in Hungarian media• Articles described the assumed (and not confirmed) side-effects of
the vaccination as frequently as the flu itself
• People were unsure about the vaccination, and this was represented and even strengthened in the media
• Officials and MDs were not against the vaccination in public, but in private the echoed the conspiracy theories
• Phobia against the flu vaccination has decreased and hardly any mass-resistance were experience in last years – despite that they contained the vaccine against H1N1, as they did in 2009/10
Thank you
Contact
• molnarcsaba.net
• +36304558181
• Skype: [email protected]
• linkedin.com/in/molnarcs
