Is the media a bigger threat than ‘flu?

Is the media’s need for black and white stories a bigger threat to the public’s health than swine ‘flu alone?

The Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project is a rather amusing website which charts the Daily Mail’s quest to gradually classify all inanimate objects into two types: those that cause cancer, and those that cure it.

 The site shows that in recent weeks the paper has added the following to the ‘cause’ camp: 

• Supermarket salads
• Showers
• Hormone Replacement Therapy
• Wi-Fi
• Coffee

 And added the following to the array of cancer cures: 

• Liquorice
• Coffee
• Bread crusts
• Milk
• Vegetarian diet

 So what about vegetarians who eat supermarket salads? 

As well as illuminating some of the many atrocities against rational, reasoned thought that the Mail commits on a daily basis, the site highlights the very real problem that public health experts have in getting their messages out to the public.

Time and again the public report being confused about public health messages.  One minute, they say, something is good for you, then it’s bad.  The perception that experts keep changing their mind is often cited by the public as their rationale for ignoring all advice.

But in reality there is a strong body of evidence of what is good and what is bad for you.  The problem is that our news media aren’t interested in reporting that.  They are interested in the new, the different, and in uncovering a ‘row’.  So if there are nine health experts who quietly concur that exercise is good for you, it will be the tenth expert, loudly claiming that exercise is bad for you, who will get all the coverage.

This is why Dr Andrew Wakefield’s now disproven claims that the MMR jab (combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine) could cause cancer in children was lent such scandalous credibility by the media.  His claims were given so much prominence and the subsequent number of parents who withheld the vaccine from their children the vaccine was so high, the number of cases of measles rose by 38% last year, dashing plans to have eradicated the disease completely by 2010.  All because his unsubstantiated claims provided good copy for the papers.

(Here’s a Daily Mail article from 2005 if you want to remember just how bad it got.)

And so we come to the current swine’ flu pandemic.  And a headline in yesterday’s Mail: Swine flu jab link to killer nerve disease.  So far the media’s coverage has been broadly responsible, but there coverage like this could prove to derail all the planning that health experts here and abroad have been putting in to minimise the  loss of life and massive disruption and that a full blown epidemic could cause.

Certainly the media have a right, a duty, to report the facts and, investigate concerns, and hold emergency planners and public health leaders to account.  But scare-mongering for the sake of a good headline is not just irresponsible, it could be lethal.