MacKrill Kate, Witthöft Michael, Wessely Simon, Petrie Keith J
Department of Psychological Medicine, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.
Department of Clinical Psychology, Psychotherapy and Experimental Psychopathology, Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Mainz, Germany.
Clin Psychol Eur. 2023 Dec 22;5(4):e12209. doi: 10.32872/cpe.12209. eCollection 2023 Dec.
Health scares are highly publicised threats to health that increase public concern and protective behaviours but are later shown to be unfounded. Although health scares have become more common in recent times, they have received very little research attention. This is despite the fact that health scares often have negative outcomes for individuals and community by affecting health behaviours and causing high levels of often unnecessary anxiety.
In this paper we undertook a review and analysis of the major types of health scares as well as the background factors associated with health scares and their spread.
We found most health scares fell into seven main categories; environmental contaminants, food, malicious incidents, medical treatments, public health interventions, radiation from technology and exotic diseases. For most health scares there are important background factors and incident characteristics that affect how they develop. Background factors include conspiracy theories, trust in governmental agencies, anxiety, modern health worries and wariness of chemicals. Incident characteristic include being newly developed, not understood or unseen, man-made rather than natural and whether the incident is out of personal control. We also identified the aspects of traditional and social media that exacerbate the rapid spread of health scares.
More research is needed to identify the characteristics of media stories that intensify the levels of public concern. Guidelines around the media's reporting of health incidents and potential health threats may be necessary in order to reduce levels of public anxiety and the negative public health impact of health scares.
健康恐慌是被高度宣传的对健康的威胁，会增加公众的担忧和保护行为，但后来被证明是毫无根据的。尽管近年来健康恐慌变得更加普遍，但它们很少受到研究关注。尽管事实上健康恐慌往往会通过影响健康行为并导致高度的、通常是不必要的焦虑，对个人和社区产生负面后果。
在本文中，我们对健康恐慌的主要类型以及与健康恐慌及其传播相关的背景因素进行了综述和分析。
我们发现大多数健康恐慌可分为七大类；环境污染物、食品、恶意事件、医疗治疗、公共卫生干预、技术辐射和外来疾病。对于大多数健康恐慌而言，存在影响其发展方式的重要背景因素和事件特征。背景因素包括阴谋论、对政府机构的信任、焦虑、现代健康担忧以及对化学物质的警惕。事件特征包括新出现、不被理解或未曾见过、人为而非自然以及事件是否超出个人控制范围。我们还确定了传统媒体和社交媒体中加剧健康恐慌迅速传播的方面。
需要更多研究来确定加剧公众担忧程度的媒体报道的特征。为了降低公众焦虑水平以及健康恐慌对公众健康的负面影响，围绕媒体对健康事件和潜在健康威胁的报道制定指导方针可能是必要的。
