TY  - JOUR
A1  - Hall, Kevin
A1  - Wolf, Meike
T1  - Whose crisis? Pandemic flu, 'communication disasters' and the struggle for hegemony
T2  - Health
N2  - Public health authorities in Germany regard communication as a crucial part of infectious disease prevention and control strategies. Communication becomes even more important during public health crises such as pandemics. Drawing on Briggs and Hallin’s concept of biocommunicability, we analysed the German National Pandemic Plan and key informant interviews with public health experts, critical infrastructure providers and ambulance services. We examined the projected expectations towards the behaviour of the audiences and the projected ways of information circulation informing public health communication strategies during a pandemic. Participants shared the expectation that the population would react towards an influenza pandemic with panic and fear due to a lack of information or a sensationalist media coverage. They associated the information uptake of their target audience with trust in their expertise. While our informants from public health conceptualised trust in terms of a face-to-face interaction, they sought to gain trust through transparency in their respective institutional settings. Our analysis suggests that this moved health information into a political register where their medical authority was open to debate. In response to this, they perceived the field of communication as a struggle for hegemony.
KW  - biocommunicability
KW  - Germany
KW  - health emergency
KW  - influenza vaccination
KW  - pandemic planning
Y1  - 2019
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/54306
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-543068
SN  - 1461-7196
SN  - 1363-4593
N1  - This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
VL  - 23
SP  - 1
EP  - 17
PB  - Sage Publ.
CY  - London [u. a.]
ER  -