OTM #3: The Zika Effect

This On The Media might be a little ways back, but I was curious to learn about Zika and the effect the media has when reporting viral diseases, titled as The Zika Effect. Zika reminded me a bit of Ebola and they do, do a bit of comparison between the two and the reporting there of.

This OTM also reminded me of this clip from Russel Howard's show when Ebola was the epidemic we were fearing in 2014.

When I first heard about Zika, I figured this is what we would see on the media coverage of it and we did, but I felt like the duration was much shorter. If you weren't listening to the news about the first week we came back for the second semester you might have missed hearing about Zika. Or least that is how it seemed to me, granted I haven't been listening to the news lately, because my roommate has taken over the living, basically all semester.

Anyways, Zika is the fourth global health emergency claimed by the World Health Organization and it is because Zika is suspected to cause microcephaly, which is when a baby is born with a smaller head due to an underdeveloped brain, and guillain-barre syndrome, which is a sudden paralyses, but has not yet been directly linked to do so, yet. The key world is 'suspected', but there is no certainty.

OK, so two questions I came away with. One, isn't the first step to remain calm ? Two, don't we preach preventive care in America?

My first question is criticism for the media that seems to dramatize everything for the sake of entertainment, but isn't their job to inform us, not entertain us?  The media seems to play into our human emotion of fearing what we don't know and can't control by dramatizing the information. But maybe the problem isn't their fault, but rather ours, because we pay attention to the drama.

The second thing that struck me was that, things like this don't get funded until it is blown up in the media. But we try to be a preventive culture in America right? That's why we brush our teeth everyday and follow up with a yearly to semiyearly dentist visit, that why they preach getting check ups, etc. Granted Zika might not be as serious as the media is painting it and we can't fund every suspicion we have in the medical field, but still kind of raises a bit of concern doesn't it?

I think this is another example of one of the down falls we have in our instant googling world and that is we want answers and we want them now. Maybe we have truly lost the philosophy that patience is a virtue in today's media society.