The case study on Risk Communication and the West Nile Virus portrayed the difficulties that many risk communicators may face when developing a plan for the public in preventing a risk. The authors of the article discuss numerous problems in risk communication including risk perception, mental noise, negative dominance, and trust determination (Covello 5). Through the example of the West Nile Virus in
New York City, one can see how these problems may develop.

Whenever the first outbreaks occurred in New York City in the summer of 1999, the city began to develop a response plan to the virus. According the article, the city had three main objectives – improve public awareness, improve public participation, and provide information in a timely manner (Covello 9). To obtain these objections, the city started several different communication programs including public service announcements on the radio and TV, daily press conferences, 24-hour phone lines, and a web site to name a few.

Despite all of these efforts, the city officials failed in their risk communication efforts on a few levels. Three of these ways are included in the problems that face most risk communicators – risk perception by the audience, mental noise that the public faces, and the lack of balance between negative and positive information.

Pertaining to risk perception, city officials failed to do a proper audience analysis to find out how they viewed their risk to the virus. In not evaluating the audience, city officials also did not assess citizens’ fears or concerns of the virus (Covello 10). Nor did officials talk to citizens about the city’s plan to use pesticides to control the mosquito population (Covello 11).

The second problem with the city officials’ risk communication efforts is that they overwhelmed the citizens with information. From the perception one gets from the article, all communication methods were used and flooded with information on the virus. Besides getting information from the city and the media, many citizens probably received information from one another which may have added to the confusion. With so many different sources, false information could have been spread that could increase panic or hostility towards the city programs (Covello 11).

The third problem that the city officials did in their efforts was to have an uneven balance between negative and positive information. Negative information came in the form of what city officials were not doing to prevent the virus from spreading. The public tends to remember the negative aspects rather than the positive. Because of this, officials should have counterweighted the negative information with positive information. For example, the city could have talked about their plans to prevent the virus from spreading and why they were choosing this plan over another.

Overall, I think the main problem that the officials had was providing too much information to the public. With this type of topic, information lines can become mixed and bad information can be given to the public causing unnecessary panic. This in turn can affect the officials’ credibility in the public’s mind. One of the main reasons that the officials probably chose to give this large amount of information to the public was to be able to reach a wide variety of audiences. However, without the proper evaluation of the audience, the city could not have possibly known which form of communication would have worked best with certain groups of people. I think the uneven balance of negative and positive information was not a main problem, but in addition to the other two problems it did not help officials. The lesson learned from this case is that risk communicators need to properly analyze their audience and be careful in the amount and type of information that they give to the public.