Characteristics of newspaper and google searched articles about porcine epidemic diarrhea compared to dengue fever

The first outbreak of porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED) since 1996 in Japan was reported in October 2013. Also, in August 2014, Japan also had the first outbreak of dengue fever (DF) since 1945. A concern with these recent incidents is the risk of a decrease in pork consumption due to misinformation or exaggeration by the news media. Therefore, our objectives were to characterize PED and DF newspaper and google-searched articles, and identify important text in the articles.

Relevant news articles during 53 weeks from January 5, 2014 to January 3, 2015 were identified by using “PED” or “DF” as the search word, by either a google search or downloaded from the Asahi news article database (Kikuzo, Asahi Shinbun, Tokyo, Japan), which is owned by the second largest newspaper company in Japan. The search period did not start from 2013 because DF had not yet occurred and the number of news articles about PED was still very low prior to 2014. The Asahi database was chosen because of its easy-access and extensive news coverage. All analyses were performed in Statistix 9 (Analytical Software, Tallhassee, FL).

The google search identified about 50 times more articles about DF (35,570) than those on PED (644). The DF articles steadily increased after January and peaked in summer, when there were 2,000 or more articles per week for 11 weeks. Furthermore, there were additional peaks 5 weeks and 11 weeks, after the first peak ended. In contrast, the number of googled articles on PED peaked in March when there were 60 or more articles per week for 3 weeks. Again there was a later peak, 11 weeks after the first peak ended.

There were 322 newspaper articles about PED over the 53 weeks compared with only 215 DF articles. However, the number of words per PED article (313 words) were less than in the DF articles (688 words).

Of the 332 PED newspaper articles, 13.5% included a phrase like “it is not infectious to humans”, 3.2% had a phrase meaning “PED pork is still edible” and 4.7% contained a phrase saying “PED pigs can be sold at market.” Additionally, 5.4% of PED articles were on the local news pages, whereas 56.3% of the 215 DF articles were on the national news pages.

Articles about PED were not as sensational as those about DF. The internet information appears to be more sensationalized than that in newspapers, although there was less information in the newspaper articles stating that “the pork is still safe to eat.” Therefore, this study shows that the swine industry needs to, disseminate more information on pork safety when diseases occur.

Disclosure of Interest: None Declared.