Truth and Trust in Science: Are They Negotiable?

BY MIKE MAGEE “The key is trust. It is when people feel totally alienated and isolated that the society breaks down. Telling the truth is what held society together.” Those words were voiced sixteen years ago in Washington, D.C. It was October 17, 2006. The HHS/CDC sponsored workshop that day was titled “Pandemic Influenza – Past, Present, Future: Communicating Today Based on the Lessons from the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic.” The speaker responsible for the quote above was writer/historian and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health adviser, John M. Barry. His opening quote from George Bernard Shaw set a somewhat pessimistic (and as we would learn 14 years later, justified) tone for the day: “What we learn from history is that we do not learn anything from history.” This was two years after the close of the 2002-2004 SARS epidemic with 8,469 cases and an 11% case fatality, and six years before MERS jumped from Egyptian camels to humans, infecting over 2,500 humans with a kill rate of 35% (858 known deaths.) Specifically, John Barry was there that day in 2006 to share lessons learned from another epidemic, the 1918 Flu Epidemic which is now estimated to have killed roughly 700,000 Americans among a population that was roughly 1/4 our current size, with 2/3 of the deaths occurring over just a 14 week period from September through December, 1918. The main point that Barry was trying to make that day focused on public communication during...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Policy Public Health Flu Epidemic HHS/CDC John Barry Source Type: blogs