When there is an outbreak of a new virus that many people are unfamiliar with, or any sickness that affects a lot of people, it can cause panic, like in cases such as Swine Flu (H1N1) or the outbreak of staph infections in the last five years. This can lead the public to be overly cautious, racing to the doctor to get their immunization shots.
In Nielson’s article, “The Health Information National Trends Survey,” he puts a lot of emphasis on that the reason that so many people are becoming overly cautious is because there is so much information out there. What people do not realize is that there are viruses and infections being spread everyday all around the world and outbreaks are not an unusual occurrence. One thing that might influence the public is all of the polls. If the polls are showing that more and more people are becoming worried or scared, then it will have a greater chance of scaring the people who read those polls.
Polling about health information is very important and should be done with great care. If anything is reported wrong, or is spun in an unnecessarily negative way, it can affect a lot of people. But it is better to be safe than sorry.
Kaiser Family Foundation is an organization that specializes in health polls and surveys. They have a great reputation for publishing reliable polls. This is an excerpt from their website at http://www.kff.org. “A leader in health policy and communications, the Kaiser Family Foundation is a non-profit, private operating foundation… Unlike grant-making foundations, Kaiser develops and runs its own research and communications programs, sometimes in partnership with other non-profit research organizations or major media companies. We serve as a non-partisan source of facts, information, and analysis for policymakers, the media, the health care community, and the public. Our product is information, always provided free of charge — from the most sophisticated policy research, to basic facts and numbers, to information young people can use to improve their health or elderly people can use to understand their Medicare benefits.”
The Kaiser Family Foundation recently published a poll about the current health reform. This was conducted on March 10-15, 2010, and published on March 26, 2010. They found that 52% Democrats strongly support health reform, while 66% Republicans strongly oppose health reform. Independents were 38% strongly opposed. In total, 28% strongly support, 18% somewhat support, 9% somewhat oppose, and 33% strongly oppose. It is unclear how many people were polled, and how the poll was conducted. They also note that “Depends on which proposal (vol.), responses for total = 3% and “Don’t know/Refused” responses for total=9%.” From what I have learned, I would not take this poll seriously without doing more in depth research on who was surveyed, how the surveys were taken, and the question is too general, considering there are many aspects to the health care reform.
Health polls are extremely important because they can tell you what disease or health problems are affecting people in different regions, financial state, etc. What is a problem in one area may not be a problem in another area. For example, there is not a problem of starvation in America, but there is definitely a food shortage in areas of Africa.
In Blendon’s article “Using Opinion Survey to Track the Public’s Response to a Bioterrorist Attack,” he believes that it is important to tell Americans what to do in an emergency situation. But it is also very important that it is important for the government and health officials to know how much Americans understand and what they believe.
I feel Blendon’s article was very useful. He made me believe that it is not just up to the health officials to take control of the situation.
Rosalind Sixbey
Iowa Journalism 