The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently held a tabletop exercise to assess how it could best work with the news media-including blogs and other online-only information sources-to get status updates and vital health information to the American people during an influenza pandemic.
The session was held on Mar 17 at HHS headquarters in Washington, DC. Representatives from online avian-flu information services such as Avian Flu Diary, FluTrackers, FluWiki, WebMD, and CIDRAP News participated in the exercise along with those from several national media organizations, including ABC News, National Public Radio, and Reuters.
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Federal officials at the table included HHS Secretary Leavitt and representatives from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Department of State, Department of Homeland Security, and the Coast Guard.
Representatives from state health departments and healthcare facilities also took part in the exercise, because they will also be fielding questions from the media and online sources throughout an influenza pandemic, and especially at the beginning. The session started with some flu basics, which regular readers here would have been familiar with, and presented a scenario that grew from routine information currently available, to the outbreak of cases around the world, in the US and locally. More from CIDRAP:Details about the pandemic exercise were off the record, but the scenario featured intensified activity overseas that prompted the World Health Organization to raise its pandemic alert stage. The situation then progressed to one suspected H5N1 case in the United States, which led to dozens of cases in major cities on both coasts.
At several points during the exercise, moderator Forrest Sawyer, a former news anchor with ABC and NBC who now runs his own media production and strategy company, Freefall Productions, asked the news media and online outlets to predict what their headlines would be and what information they would need from HHS, CDC, and other agencies. The details of the scenario are not only off the record, they're unimportant (of interest, the CFR used was significantly higher than the 11-12% I observed at CDC the week prior for their exercise, and early on in a pandemic likely will be hard to nail down.) What's important to emphasize is that the questions we were confronted with (and that we asked ourselves) not only could happen, but do happen. How do we deal with rumors? When and do we use our sources, and when and how do we identify them? What do we put online and why? Are we afraid of a panicked public (and before dismissing the concept, remember that we are dealing with the scenario of an actual pandemic and an unprepared public)?
The flu bloggers work in a fairly transparent world (pseudonymnity aside), and in some cases, we deal with those questions now. For example, if you want to see how we deal with rumors, check how we (and others) handled the Toronto couple that may have had H5N1 (but didn't) earlier this month. While the Toronto hospital was unhappy with the attention, we were unhappy with the media handling by the Toronto hospital. There are always lessons to be learned by both sides, but the main one here is transparency and common sense: don't do a test to rule out a condition while denying the possibility the condition exists. That one doesn't pass the smell test, and we all picked up on it - as Mike Leavitt said on his blog, "These people knew their stuff." We aren't journalists, we're specialty bloggers. We put rumors out there so they can be confirmed or debunked. We also let officials astute enough to read us know what rumors are out there. We rely for the most part on news services, but in some cases, have our own sources. But what we add, the same as traditional media, is context.
It's hard won experience, but we learned from Turkey in 2006 and Indonesia before and since that there are outbreaks of various kinds going on all the time, and moves that federal and state officials are taking to prepare are sometimes routine and sometimes more than routine. Some are PR, but some have significant meaning (such as the PAHPA legislation that created the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness Response.) It's why we spend time trying to dissect this, so we better understand what it means to us locally.
Another issue touched upon in the HHS exercise, and mentioned by CIDRAP is 'embedding'. During the exercise the communications officials from HHS floated the idea of "embedding" some of their staff in media organizations to ease access to official information during a pandemic. The agency also said its media access policies now treat reputable blogs and other reputable online services the same as traditional media organizations.
Stephanie Marshall, director of pandemic communications at HHS, told CIDRAP News that because growing numbers of people are going to online sources for news and information, "It's important for the government to understand how best to work with bloggers and other online journalists to distribute information. The exercise and the insights offered by the participating bloggers will help us improve and refine our existing pandemic communications plan." Personally, I find 'embedding' an unfortunate term. It's an inside-the beltway phrase used to indicate easier access, but to the rest of us, it raises uncomfortable issues about transparency in a pseudonymous world (am I an HHS embed because I've attended HHS events? Nah. Are you? Probably not). That conversation didn't go very far other than everyone agreeing that:
1. every blog or news organization can't possibly have its own expert loaned to us by HHS or CDC or NIH and
2. online entities like blogs and forums need the same access to the alphabets (HHS, CDC, DHS, etc) as traditional media. In a real pandemic we are going to want to know what they have to say.
The traditional media were as skeptical as we were of the mechanics of how that would work, but we will all want information, so that's going to have to be a work in progress to figure out.
As far as a 'panicked public', this has been discussed at length in many places. The better prepared the public is, the less panic there will be, but if we have bad things happening, there's going to be a good number of upset and worried people even if they don't panic (or even if panic is not the right word). It's a relevant topic because local officials in Utah just canceled a pandemic prep class because it would cause panic among residents. This backwards thinking is exactly the wrong way to approach this, and highlights the task we all have in moving forward on educating the public.
So, if readers and posters have thoughts about what they would like to see us doing, whether it's reporting on school closures or local cases, or contacting officials for the latest formal news, or just keeping channels open, let us know. The more we think about it beforehand, the better a job we (and everyone else) will be able to do. We're as committed to doing the best job we can now and in the future as anyone who hasn't thought about those things. |
