Millennium Bugs and Weapons of Mass Fear: Dialogs Between Science and Popular Culture in the 1990's
"There are notable disjunctures between representations of epidemics and disease threats, and the actual outbreaks themselves, a point of considerable interest for this research. For example, the increase in media attention to Ebola virus actually preceded the actual 1995 outbreak of this disease in Zaire, which occurred a full 19 years after the most recent previous outbreak. Mass media, including the news, do not simply reflect reality, but also create it through the deployment of language and imagery. The signification of emerging infectious diseases, like that of AIDS, occurs primarily through the assignment and standardization of definitions and images, arrived at in a mass-mediated dialogue between science and popular culture. The meanings created in this process then serve as templates which frame related issues. Just as the AIDS epidemic provided a blueprint for the representation of emerging infectious diseases such as Ebola virus, hantavirus, and ""mad cow disease,"" representations of these newer infectious disease threats heavily inform our understandings of germ warfare threats."
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign