HEALTHCARE
ZIKA AND BEYOND: HOW TO COMMUNICATE ABOUT CRISES
ANTHONY S. FAUCI, M.D. Director, National Institute of Allergic and Infectious Diseases, National Institute of Health
During the Ebola outbreak, we admitted two patients infected with the virus to the NIH Clinical Center. People would ask me, “My goodness, are you putting us at great risk?” So I would ask them, “How did you get to work this morning?” They would answer by saying something to the effect of, “Well, I got on the Beltway and drove to the NIH.” This is a highspeed road that encircles Washington, DC, and carries more than 200,000 vehicles per day. I would point out, “Well, your commute posed a greater risk to you than an Ebola patient at the Clinical Center.” We live in a world where we take risks every day. When you have been taking a risk every day, for the last 20 or 30 years, you may be fully aware of the risk, but you have learned to live with it and it does not bother you. However, it is very interesting to me how people react when they are confronted with a new risk. When a new risk emerges, especially if it is highly publicized, people often start to consider the new risk to be more significant than others that, in reality, pose a greater threat. This is human nature. We saw it with Ebola, we saw
it here in Washington, D.C., with the anthrax attacks, and we are starting to see it now with Zika. Zika virus is not actually new. It was first recognized in 1947 in a monkey in the Zika forest of Uganda. It was not known to infect humans until 1952, and it stayed under the radar screen for a long time. The virus circulated relatively unnoticed in areas of Africa and Southeast Asia until 2007, when it caused an outbreak on the Yap Islands in Micronesia. In 2013, the virus caused a much larger outbreak in French Polynesia. Despite this spread, few people paid much attention to the virus because the disease it caused was thought to be mild. Now, of course, the situation has changed. The current outbreak that started in Brazil last year has provided new evidence that Zika virus can also
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