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One-third of articles about vaccines contained negative messages
Hussain H. Pediatrics. 2011;doi:10.1542/peds.2010-17220.
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Monitoring news accounts on articles about vaccines could help craft vaccine-safety messages, according to an article published online.
Hamidah Hussain, MBBS, MSc,and colleagues from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore examined about 1,200 articles relating to vaccination, which were published between 1995 and 2005. The researchers used key terms such as “vaccine” and “adverse events” and coded these articles as having an overall “positive” or “negative” message, accordingly.
The researchers noted spikes in the number of newspaper articles in 1999 regarding rotavirus vaccine safety and in 2002 and 2003 regarding smallpox vaccines. These articles coincided with policy/program changes from the government or an announcement from the FDA or pharmaceutical companies regarding these vaccines.
Articles about measles-mumps-rubella and thimerosal appeared across all years, the researchers noted.
Overall, the researchers found about one-third of the articles had a “negative” take-home message about vaccines.
Most of the stories were related to vaccine-safety concerns and vaccine policy, the researchers said.
“The association between parents’ self-reports of receiving information from the media and school exemptions suggests the potential for the media to influence parents’ opinions about the safety of vaccines and contribute to increasing parents’ uncertainty about the safety of vaccines,” the researchers wrote. “Future research should focus on determining how parents interpret media messages about immunization and if vaccine-safety reporting from the news media affects parental vaccine knowledge, attitudes and behaviors.”
Disclosure: One of the study authors, Neal A. Halsey, MD, reports he received compensation for serving on safety-monitoring committees for Novartis and Merck, research grants through Johns Hopkins University from Crucell and Intercell for studies of unrelated vaccines in Guatemala, and an honorarium for attending a meeting with Sanofi-Pasteur MSD, a company in Europe; the other researchers reported no relevant financial disclosures.
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