An Epidemic of Rumors

How Stories Shape Our Perception of Disease

Jon D. Lee

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780874219289
• eBook ISBN: 9780874219296
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythology
• Index: Social Sciences

In An Epidemic of Rumors, Jon D. Lee examines the human response to epidemics through the lens of the 2003 SARS epidemic. Societies usually respond to the eruption of disease by constructing stories, jokes, conspiracy theories, legends, and rumors, but these narratives are often more damaging than the diseases they reference. The information disseminated through them is often inaccurate, incorporating xenophobic explanations of the disease's origins and questionable medical information about potential cures and treatment.

Folklore studies brings important and useful perspectives to understanding cultural responses to the outbreak of disease. Through this etiological study Lee shows the similarities between the narratives of the SARS outbreak and the narratives of other contemporary disease outbreaks like AIDS and the H1N1 virus. His analysis suggests that these disease narratives do not spring up with new outbreaks or diseases but are in continuous circulation and are recycled opportunistically. Lee also explores whether this predictability of vernacular disease narratives presents the opportunity to create counter-narratives released systematically from the government or medical science to stymie the negative effects of the fearful rumors that so often inflame humanity.

With potential for practical application to public health and health policy, An Epidemic of Rumors will be of interest to students and scholars of health, medicine, and folklore.

1 Chronicle of a Health Panic

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The origins of the SARS coronavirus can be traced to China’s Guangdong province, though it was some months after the disease’s initial outbreak in the Western world that a full timeline could be constructed. Secrecy on the part of the Chinese government is the main reason for this, followed closely by the difficulties of tracing public disease pathways in reverse. But even after locating the earliest-known examples of human-related SARS, investigators were still left questioning where the virus had come from before entering the human population; viruses aren’t created ex nihilo, so the disease had to have its origins elsewhere. But where? An animal? Which animal? And how did the virus manage to cross thousands of miles of land and open water to simultaneously spring up in Hong Kong, Hanoi, and Toronto but miss the places in between?

This chapter will discuss these issues. A full-scale timeline is not necessary for the purposes of this study; more to the point, it would add potentially several hundred pages of largely irrelevant information. It is, however, necessary to cover the basics: to point out how the brief ripples caused by skipping a rock over the pond intertwine. The materials used to create this chapter largely consist of newspaper articles; the methods used for gathering them can be seen in some ways as evidence of public concern about the disease at various points in time.

From April 2003 to summer 2004, the daily news regularly featured reports on SARS. The bulk of these articles, however, were printed between April 2, 2003, and July 2, 2003. The decrease in available articles after this point in time can be seen as evidence of waning public interest in the disease in concordance with the virus’s declining worldwide presence. July 2, 2003, for example, is the day the World Health Organization (WHO) removed Toronto from its list of infected cities. Not coincidentally, North American news sources soon began to focus their attentions elsewhere. By 2004 media sources only printed two or three articles a week on SARS, and the last of the series of regularly published stories sputtered out in July of that year. Subsequent journalistic contributions do exist but dwindle to sporadic thrashings, barely managing one or two contributions a month, and by mid-2005, even those were gone.

These news reports can be seen as a chronicle of public, media-based information concerning the epidemic. That is, they constitute a selective progression of events based on journalistic customs and biases, which are largely based on considerations of assumed public interest. The narratives that construct the media’s version of events are therefore suspect, for though this version does contain much that is true and factual, it also bends at times toward the sensational at the cost of objectivity. Why then use media sources to construct a timeline, as rife as the result will be with biases? Because the media was in many cases the primary disseminator of data for the public, and large sectors of the population were directly influenced by what they heard on the evening news or read in the morning papers. Many of the informants interviewed for this book said that they kept their televisions turned on constantly throughout the SARS epidemic and always tuned to a local news channel. And if the news reported rumors, it is only logical that those rumors became part of public consciousness.

Such reliance on media sources is problematic for several reasons. Steven Epstein has noted that the media’s continual use of a specific set of reporters and “experts” to discuss a situation not only mirrors “the internal stratification of a social movement or a scientific community, but can even construct such hierarchies” (Epstein 1996, 335, emphasis in original). In this sense, media reports cannot be seen as simply a record of the events in an epidemic but must be considered a functional part of those events, both shaping them and being shaped by them. If a media source designates Doctor X as an expert on the topic and continually uses his sound bites (perhaps because he is simply more photogenic or better at paring down complex jargon than his peers), then Doctor X literally becomes the expert on the subject in the eyes of the public—despite the fact that he might not know as much as Doctor Y, who is simply not as effective at communicating with media sources.

Seen in this light, the media plays a complex role in epidemics, particularly because media outlets largely attempt to deal with a large quantity of information by filtering it into small, journalistic sound bites that take up only a few columns in the daily newspaper or a few minutes on the nightly news. Actions such as these, especially when they involve something as technical and rapidly changing as a disease epidemic, are troubling, since many of the problems with and confusions about SARS that resulted in panic and xenophobia came from the interactions and communications (or lack thereof) that took place between official medicine, the media, and the public. For example, it took the scientific community some time to isolate the SARS coronavirus and locate its source in the Chinese civet cat. During that time the scientific community advanced many hypotheses concerning such details, and, as is the nature of scientific work, many of those hypotheses were ultimately proven incorrect and were retracted. Regardless, media sources reported every piece of news relating to the origin of SARS they could glean from the scientific community, resulting in a flood of information that was sometimes only “accurate” for a matter of hours. But an information-hungry public made the media’s actions possible by purchasing in mass quantities any newspaper with the word “SARS” in its headline. And this information-hungry public absorbed that information, leading to laypeople discussing the epidemic in both public and private conversations—the accuracy of their conversations only as good as the last newspaper article they had read.

Two critical problems arise from this scenario. First, distinct levels of vocabulary exist in all three layers of this picture—from the highly technical medical jargon of the scientific community to the simplistic vocabulary employed by most newspapers, to the widely varied communication styles employed by laypeople. The problem is that the media, which has arguably the simplest language of the three, is the main source of communication between the scientific and lay communities. Any information that comes from the scientific community must therefore be pared down to its bare bones and rephrased in such a fashion as to make it understandable to the general public. Considerable loss of nuance and meaning results from such paring, a consequence that can result in miscommunication and misunderstanding.

A second area of concern in this relationship is the accuracy and completeness of information flowing between sources. The media is a problematic source of information because it is a business and therefore has as a primary interest the creation of profit. News stories that sell newspapers will get published as a result while news stories that are of lesser interest or impact will be put aside, pushed to later pages of the paper, or left uncovered altogether. As such, access to information curtails the coverage of the thousands of newsworthy events that take place around the world on a daily basis but so do economic judgments concerning which of those events will be seen as the more interesting by the public, and will thus sell more product. S. Elizabeth Bird (1996) has commented on the nature of this relationship at length, stating specifically,

News reflects and reinforces particular cultural anxieties and concerns. It goes in waves; many scholars have demonstrated, for example, that waves of reporting about teenage suicide or child abuse do not necessarily reflect actual changes in the rates of these problems. Rather, they reflect waves of interest, and in turn feed the anxieties that have produced the interest in the first place. (Bird 1996, 47)

What appears in the pages of newspapers and the special reports on the evening news cannot thus be assumed to be an unbiased and accurate reflection of daily events. Instead, it must be thought of as a subjective representation of them, sifted through numerous political, economic, social, and cultural filters.

The effect that the media ultimately has on the public is contentious. There are some who argue that the narratives dispersed by media sources are ultimately helpful. After all, the media does disseminate useful, correct information on a regular basis, including articles that debunk popular misconceptions or warn of the negative consequences of certain actions. The title of Marshall Goldberg’s (1987) article epitomizes this stance: “TV Has Done More to Contain AIDS than Any Other Single Factor.” Goldberg’s piece defends television-based AIDS reporting, arguing that, despite the problems to the contrary (inaccuracy, sensationalism, etc.), television has ultimately improved the public’s mediatory responses to the epidemic, having taught the basics of transmission, susceptibility, and prevention. This article is admittedly not scholarly, appearing as it did in the pages of TV Guide, but as it was written by a physician and appeared in the pages of a magazine with a purported circulation of 16.3 million in 1989 (Jones 1989), many of its readers no doubt considered it authoritative.

On the other side of the argument lie those who claim that the narratives circulated by the media have done varying degrees of harm, largely due to their inaccuracy, misunderstanding of key concepts, or misrepresentation. Benjamin Radford (2005) provides an example of the sometimes-inaccurate nature of news reports in his article “Ringing False Alarms: Skepticism and Media Scares.” Radford only briefly mentions SARS in his work, mainly as an example of a disease that is regularly given “alarmist headlines.” But he does present four major stories that appeared in newspapers between 1990 and 2001, including missing/exploited children, racism-fueled church fires, the dangerous nature of bounty hunters, and the 2001 case of a Nigerian “slave ship.” In all four cases, the nature of the threats and the numbers associated with the stories were grossly overexaggerated by the media—as in the case of the slave ship, which turned out to be an innocuous ferry transporting job-hunting (and free-living) teenagers to Cotonou, Benin. Radford claims that the most exaggerated series of stories involved the presence of missing or lost children, a number estimated by the US Department of Justice to reach 400,000 each year. But a study by the Crimes Against Children Research Center found that 73 percent of those children were home within twenty-four hours, and parents, usually as a result of divorce, absconded with most of the remaining children. In fact, between 1990 and 1995, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children handled only 515 cases of children abducted by strangers (Radford 2005). Thus, the media cannot be assumed to consistently provide accurate reports.

In reference to SARS, the media has often been criticized for making matters seem worse than they actually were. Peter Washer, in “Representations of SARS in the British Newspapers,” which appeared in 2004, closely examined news articles that appeared in all major Sunday national newspapers in the United Kingdom for a four-week period after March 16, 2003. Any article that mentioned SARS was noted, coded for any of twenty-four key themes, and entered into a qualitative software database. Washer made his first observation upon examining his results:

In the very first reports of SARS on 16 March, all the articles referred to the new illness as a “killer bug” or to a “mysterious” “lethal” “deadly pneumonia virus.” This new “threat” was described as “moving at the speed of a jet” and people affected were not responding to traditional treatments. Combined with adjectives like “untreatable” were some graphic descriptions of how the “victims’ lungs swell and they suffocate.” (Washer 2004, 2565)

For the first two weeks of the period Washer studied, newspaper articles revolved around several themes, including the origin of the disease, the attempts by Western doctors to combat it, the search for a “patient zero,” and the idea that SARS could be the next plague. By the third week, however, only three types of stories dominated the papers: (1) Chinese corruption and inefficiency; (2) the death of a major researcher, Dr. Carlo Urbani, who contracted SARS while in Thailand; and (3) the negative effects of SARS on the economy. By the fourth week the only remain...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Chronicle of a Health Panic
• 2 SARS and AIDS
• 3 We Gather Together
• 4 Private Actions in Public Spaces
• 5 “Please Receive Communion through Your Hands”
• 6 The Cause and the Cure
• 7 This Little Virus Went to Market
• 8 Full Circle
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• References
• About the Author
• Index