David M. Berube – författare

This book examines how we design and deliver health communication messages relating to outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics. We have experienced major changes to how the public receives and searches for information about health crises over  the last twelve decades with the ongoing shift from text/broadcast-based to digital messaging and social media. Both health theories and practices are examined as it applies to testing, tracking, hoarding, therapeutics, and vaccines with case studies. Challenges to communicate about health to diverse audiences (including the science illiterate) and across (both Western and developing economies) have been complicated by politics, norms and mores, personal heuristics, and biases, such as mortality salience, news avoidance, and quarantine fatigue. Issues of economic development and land use, trade and transportation, and even climate change have increased the exposure of human populations to infectious diseases making risk and resilience more pressing.

The book has been designed to support health communicators and public health management professionals, students, and interested stakeholders and university libraries.

The aim of the book was to produce the most comprehensive examination of a pandemic that has ever been attempted. By cataloging the full extent of the Zika pandemic, this book will be the most complete history and epistemic contextualization ever attempted to date. The work should function as the primary source for students, researchers, and scholars who need information about the Zika pandemic.

This edited volume draws from health communication scholars and offers a depthful examination of the roles vaccination have played and continue to play in contributing to human, community, and transnational protection against infectious diseases. The problems associated with vaccination against infection diseases was made abundantly clear during the current pandemic of COVID-19. Vaccines were traced back to Dr. Edward Jenner in the 18th century as a tool to control smallpox in England. Today we have six different categories of vaccines (three seem most controversial today): inactivated, live-attenuated, and messenger RNA (mRNA). We examine the reasons for public reluctance and outright resistance to vaccines examining cognitive biases, communication campaign failures, politicization, misinformation, partisanship, and greed. The healthcare industry has not treated all infected people equally, especially the poor and people of color. This is true in the USA as well as abroad. In the future, we can expect more exotic infections to increase due to globalization, development, and transportation. As climate changes, humans will contact more species carrying many different bacteria and viruses. Advances in medical research have led to increases in the number of vaccinations available to control infection and outbreaks. However, the rates of vaccination have fluctuated over time. A vaccine that is not used is meaningless. To increase vaccination rates, we must learn why the public shies away from vaccinations and under what circumstances. This information will enable us to design more effective messaging and communication campaigns to maximize general resilience. An interactive partnership between providers of healthcare and their patients is a prerequisite to productive and effective vaccination campaigns