Boileau Communications Management LLC

What I learned from Swine Flu

Unrelenting headlines on the swine flu last month prompted much of the world to go temporarily crazy. There was some good in it: The run on surgical masks, hand sterilizer and anti-flu treatments provided some economic stimulus of its own. One beneficiary was our good client Perrigo, which saw a nice bump in sales as people flooded their local drug stores for supplies to stave off the “pandemic.”

There was a lot of noise about it. Some was serious, some was just silly and some was purely cynical as “experts” of every stripe sought to cash in on the public fear. But as it recedes into the distance, the swine flu hysteria leaves behind a lingering concern for public health communicators. Give people enough phoney scares and they won’t pay attention when the real thing comes along. The people responsible for communicating on public health issues had a tough call on this one. They needed to balance a need for public awareness with a competing need not to inflict too much trauma on the national psyche. The wheels came off their efforts early on as the mainstream news media whipped up the froth on a story too good to let go.

The take-away lessons for the rest of us are good reminders of some basics:

—Facts are good; facts presented in perspective are better.
—Hype leads to skepticism; always has and always will.