Department of Sociology, Rutgers University, Davison Hall, 26 Nichol Avenue, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 08901, USA.
Soc Sci Med. 2021 Nov;289:114398. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114398. Epub 2021 Sep 16.
The way newspapers frame infectious disease outbreaks and their connection to the environmental determinants of disease transmission matter because they shape how we understand and respond to these major events. In 2017, following an unexpected climatic event named "El Niño Costero," a dengue epidemic in Peru affected over seventy-five thousand people. This paper examines how the Peruvian news media presented dengue, a climate-sensitive disease, as a public health problem by analyzing a sample of 265 news stories on dengue from two major newspapers published between January 1st and December 31st of 2017. In analyzing the construction of responsibility for the epidemic, I find frames that blamed El Niño Costero's flooding and Peru's poorly prepared cities and public health infrastructure as the causes of the dengue outbreak. However, when analyzing frames that offer solutions to the epidemic, I find that news articles call for government-led, short-term interventions (e.g., fogging) that fail to address the decaying public health infrastructure and lack of climate-resilient health systems. Overall, news media tended to over-emphasize dengue as requiring technical solutions that ignore the root causes of health inequality and environmental injustice that allow dengue to spread in the first place. This case speaks to the medicalization of public health and to a long history of disease-control programs in the Global South that prioritized top-down technical approaches, turning attention away from the social and environmental determinants of health, which are particularly important in an era of climate change.
报纸报道传染病暴发及其与疾病传播的环境决定因素的方式很重要，因为它们影响我们对这些重大事件的理解和应对方式。2017 年，在一场名为“厄尔尼诺沿海气候”的意外气候事件之后，秘鲁爆发了登革热疫情，超过 7.5 万人受到影响。本文通过分析 2017 年 1 月 1 日至 12 月 31 日期间两份主要报纸上刊登的 265 篇关于登革热的新闻报道，考察了秘鲁新闻媒体如何将登革热这种对气候敏感的疾病作为公共卫生问题来报道。在分析对疫情责任的构建时，我发现有一些框架将厄尔尼诺沿海气候的洪水以及秘鲁准备不足的城市和公共卫生基础设施归咎于登革热疫情的爆发。然而，在分析提供疫情解决方案的框架时，我发现新闻文章呼吁政府主导的短期干预措施（例如喷雾），但这些措施未能解决公共卫生基础设施恶化和缺乏适应气候变化的卫生系统的问题。总的来说，新闻媒体往往过分强调登革热需要技术解决方案，而忽视了导致登革热首先传播的健康不平等和环境不公正的根本原因。这一案例反映了公共卫生的医学化，以及全球南方长期以来的疾病控制项目优先考虑自上而下的技术方法，从而忽视了健康的社会和环境决定因素，而在气候变化时代，这些因素尤为重要。
