FluPortal.org

[Riemer Palstra / cc (usable on your site) / Flickr]

Last Friday, PRX’s Jake Shapiro sent me an email that was making the public-radio rounds. In it, Dave Fender, an audio producer at Colorado Public Radio, had asked the H1N1 question every pubmedia reporter/producer wants to: what happens when someone sneezes on my mic?

So, the station has been having staff meetings about the flu and our “pandemic plan” to handle operations in case we all manage to go down at once. And the question came up about what we’re doing to keep our mics and other shared gear as sterile as possible. [...] I said I would put the word out to ask if anyone else out there is using anything or doing anything special to keep mic windscreens and control surfaces and such as sterile as possible?

Long-time indy radio producer Catherine Stifter — who also happens to be a lead instructor at the Wilderness Medicine Institute of NOLS — fired back with an answer. She told me she got her information from WMI’s curriculum director.

This flu is known to be spread mostly by coughing and sneezing. Anyone with a fever should NOT be working a mic. Tell them to go home. 24 hours fever-free is the recommendation.

For equipment I use in teaching wilderness first aid courses, we are using alcohol wipes to sterilize CPR mannequins. Kills 99% of everything. Also frequent hand washing (doesn’t address the coughing/sneezing contamination, but is a very good practice ALL the time).

Alcohol wipes: probably better for your kit than a glob of hand sanitizer.

NHPR’s The Exchange, hosted by Laura Knoy, devoted a whole hour last month to “Handling H1N1” — handling it, that is, as a journalist. In other words: how should reporters and producers approach the story? Her guests included an epidemiologist, health reporters, and NHPR’s own news director.

Although the program is almost a month old, the advice in it holds up well. Among the things discussed: putting the disease and risks into context, the thinning ranks of experienced health reporters, and finding the balance between underexposing and overexposing the story.

Here’s what two of the guests highlighted.

New Hampshire state epidemiologist Dr. Jose Montero has spent considerable time talking with local media since swine flu emerged. These are some of the things that came up in their discussions:

When we’re talking about public health and infectious diseases, those are topics that create a lot of fear in the general community. And we can overdo awareness and get people to panic, or we can underdo it and then get people unprepared. [...] How do we choose wisely, how do we decide who is really an expert, who we want to be [...] leading the development of public opinion? It cannot be just the state, it cannot be only government, but how can we bring scientists and get the scientists to speak properly in a population-based approach, not about “my last weirdest, more complicated case”? [...] We need to put things in context.

Maryn McKenna is an independent public-health journalist who broke the H5N1 avian-flu story in US media back in August 1997 — so she’s been reporting on flu for a long time. One of her main concerns is the lack of seasoned health reporters:

There are very large numbers of experienced science and health reporters who have lost their jobs because of the economy and the changing shape of the media over the past couple of years. [...] So all the people who would be counted on to know this subject and to be able to give context [...], most of those people don’t work in the media anymore, and the people who are covering the story are people to whom flu is a very new thing [...] and therefore they’re more vulnerable to becoming as alarmed about the topic as a member of the average population would be.

Listen to the entire hour here.

On October 8th, WXXI-TV’s Second Opinion will broadcast a pre-recorded “H1N1 Special Edition,” in which public-health experts field questions from a studio audience at WXXI in Rochester, NY, and from other PBS viewers throughout the country. The program will be distributed nationally on October 11th.

PRX intern Nilagia McCoy spoke with Norm Silverstein, president of WXXI, about the special. Silverstein said, “We chose a town-hall format for this episode because flu is a highly personal illness. This is why we wanted to hear from not just doctors, but from everyday people as well.” To make the program customizable for local stations, he explained, WXXI will also offer a 30-minute version “that will give stations the option of packaging with a local show to direct people to resources in their community.”

To reach as many people as possible, Silverstein said, “the program will be available on-demand after the fact for online viewing at Second Opinion. WXXI will also provide an audio-only version for public radio stations to download free of charge.”

[Update 29 October 2009: Here's the video of the hour that Kristin Tutino points to in her comments below.]

[wxxitube / YouTube]

Sacha Pfeiffer [WBUR]

WBUR’s Sacha Pfeiffer is covering swine flu this fall. Her beat centers on Boston — a hub for hospitals and universities — so she’s making daily phone calls to check up on medical news and college cases. She shared some reporting tips with me yesterday.

First off, she said, “all states and most cities have public-health departments. They’re definitely the first places to start.” (You can find links to those health departments on our states/communities page.) She added that while most departments have an H1N1 section on their websites, the information tends to be standard fare from the CDC. So she starts with a phone call to a department’s media-relations office. Because “the state is trying to have select people be spokespeople,” this typically points her to the same “go-to” sources that other reporters are using, but it’s a good start.

As she’s gotten deeper into the story, Pfeiffer has built up her network of sources though old-fashioned phone legwork. She’s found this to be more useful and efficient than sitting through H1N1 seminars and such. Making calls is also necessary because, she says, “in Massachusetts, there’s not yet an emergency, so the state can’t mandate — it can only make suggestions — so I have to call individual towns and schools” to find out what actions they’re taking.

I asked Pfeiffer how she decides, as a local reporter, whether a story is newsworthy. Her answer: it’s all about context. If, say, Boston University has 20 kids with probable H1N1 in its clinic, she’ll ask health officials or other colleges for their numbers for comparison. If BU stands out, there’s a story. If it doesn’t, there’s not.

Pfeiffer has been filing swine-flu stories both on-air and online. Generally, she says, “the web has more room for more information,” so if she has 45 seconds on the air, she’ll add extras online. Here’s one way she repurposed two broadcast segments into web content: her local Morning Edition host debriefed her on-air about H1N1, and then she took the interviews and turned them into written Q&As. Find them here and here.

Her biggest cautionary note involved the numbers. “Most states,” she said, “aren’t testing for swine flu anymore. They’re just assuming you have H1N1.” So the data are pretty back-of-the-envelope. The important thing, she underlined, is to reflect the uncertainty by reporting, for example, “34 suspected cases” rather than “34 cases” — unless you know for sure.

Check out more of Pfeiffer’s swine-flu reporting here and WBUR’s H1N1 page here.

[Update 13 October 2009: Pfeiffer just posted another Q&A fashioned from an on-air segment.]

Marketplace has reported on swine flu several times this autumn. (You can check out its recent coverage here, including today’s piece on workplace worries.)

Managing editor George Judson explained to me in an email that the Marketplace team is “tracking [H1N1] as a developing story.” This means they’re paying close attention but being selective:

It comes up fairly often in our daily news meetings, but so far we’re keeping a
fairly high threshold — is the day’s swine flu news really one of the top three or four business/economy stories of the day? Because of our business focus, we’re not so susceptible to scare stories, for lack of a better term. [...]


This selectivity can be a strength for us. A couple of weeks ago, for example, we passed on a White House report that said the pandemic would level some large proportion of the population. The next day the CDC furiously contested the report.

Marketplace is of course a national show with a specific focus — but the general principle of that high threshold makes sense even in the most local newsroom.

This evening, Wisconsin Public Television and Wisconsin Public Radio will present Here and Now – Preparing for H1N1. The collaboration will be broadcast on WPT stations and simulcast on the WPR Ideas Network across the state. The special will feature interviews with public health officials and medical experts and answer audience questions on the H1N1 pandemic.

I spoke with Andy Moore, a Senior News Producer at WPT, and asked about the timing of the program. “For this special, we wanted to find the right point in the story to engage our audience. We needed to wait until there was a sufficient level of awareness, but also produce the program early enough in the flu season to contribute prevention and education.” On how the TV and radio teams came to work together Moore says, “Our organizations have collaborated on election coverage in the past, and that set a model for how we came to work together on this issue.”

In addition to the on-air discussion, during the program there will be a separate toll-free number staffed by a panel of health experts to take questions from the audience off-air. The goal is to answer as many questions as possible from concerned citizens – not just the ones that make it on-air during the broadcast. Moore says, “Many people may have questions about H1N1, but some don’t want to ask them on a live call-in show. We wanted to serve that audience while also producing a valuable on-air discussion.”

The hour-long special airs tonight at 7 pm Central Time. Live video will be streamed on the WPT website and audio will be available on the WPR live stream.

Should you say “H1N1″ or “swine flu” — or both — in your reporting?

Joe Neel, the health editor of NPR’s science desk, explained NPR’s policy in a recent email to the FluPortal team. NPR, he says, uses both terms interchangeably. When using “H1N1,” it “prefer[s] ‘new H1N1′ or ‘pandemic H1N1,’ at least on first reference.”

This is the reasoning:

–The virus is a new swine virus, so it is accurate to call it ”swine flu” or “new swine flu.”
 
–The virus is a new H1N1 virus, so it is also accurate to call it “H1N1″ or “the new H1N1 virus.” 
 
–We view “swine flu” as somewhat more precise scientifically than  ”H1N1.” There are at least 11,000 strains of animal flu viruses called H1N1, some of them swine, some human, some bird, etc. The top virologists in the world agree that this is a swine H1N1.  
 
–The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls it “2009 H1N1 (Swine Flu).”

Go ahead: it’s safe to BBQ
[ctaloi / CC (usable on your site) / Flickr]

The U.S. pork industry is unhappy about the “swine flu” moniker. For starters, H1N1 is made up of genetic material from swine and avian (bird) and human influenza viruses, and it hasn’t infected U.S. swine. So, it says, why blame the pigs? More importantly, the term “swine flu” has hurt hog prices, though you can’t get the flu by grilling up a nice chop or bacon.

Michelle O’Neill, news editor at WVIK in Illinois (Augustana Public Radio), just emailed us to explain that her station uses only “H1N1″ as a result of listener feedback:

We have received a number of calls from our listeners who are farmers, pork producers, and in the business community who object to the term “swine flu.” [...]

Unless reporters who refer to it as “swine flu” give explanations in every story that the strain is a combination of several types and not swine alone, the term is vague. I hope NPR will consider changing its policy for clarity and accuracy.

So it’s up to you. You can argue it both ways. FluPortal will follow NPR’s lead and use both terms.

[Update 21 October 2009: Swine flu has now appeared in US pigs. The Department of Agriculture says pork remains safe to eat.]

NPR has consolidated its H1N1 coverage with the launch of a special series, “Swine Flu: The Second Wave“.  The web page will collect H1N1 coverage from NPR news reports and blogs as we head into flu season. NPR has also added the Second Wave series to the API Query Generator. Any stations using the older World Health H1N1 API feed should change to the new series to receive updated Swine Flu coverage this fall. Additionally, stations (and audience members) can take advantage of  the series RSS feed. We’ve updated our Web Resources page and NPR API guide to reflect the new NPR series.

A number of public media stations and programs are covering the impact of the H1N1 pandemic on schools and universities. In planning for the return of students this fall, education officials and adminstrators find themselves ahead of the curve in combating the spread of H1N1 influenza. Among the reports:

• KSKA: District prepares for H1N1 cases
• New Hampshire Public Radio: At UNH, hoping the swine flu doesn’t arrive
• WAMU: Local universities prepare for threat of swine flu this year
• KPLU: Schools prepare for swine flu
• WUNC: Universities prepare for H1N1 flu
• NewsHour: Schools brace for H1N1 outbreaks
• Marketplace: Swine Flu prevention may cost schools

The CDC has issued H1N1 preparation guidelines for K-12 schools and other educational institutions. Stations may consider contacting their local school officials to discuss their H1N1 preparations.