AHCJ Board President Ferris Frayer speaks with Caitlin Jeterina, MPH, PhD, about Jeterina’s newsletter, “Your Local Epidemiologist.” Photo by Zachary Linhares.
At the height of the pandemic, when misinformation and fear were rampant, Dr. Caitlin Jeterina wrote a newsletter called “Your local epidemiologistIts goal is to “provide translated public health science directly to the local, national and international communities.”
What began as a three-sentence email to colleagues, students and staff quickly evolved into an internationally recognized public health information source. During a Q&A at Health Journalism 2024, Jeterina explained the biggest challenges in disseminating public health information and how agencies have succeeded and failed during the pandemic.
Speaking at a session moderated by AHCJ president Felice Freyer on Friday, Jeterina said the success of her newsletter revealed just how wide the gap is between government agencies and researchers who study health and the general public.
“Communication always carries a risk of being wrong one way or another,” Jeterina said. “Many government agencies don’t want to take that risk.”
Jeterina acknowledges that as an independent publisher, she has more freedom to speak directly to the public than an agency like the CDC. In fact, CDC representatives have reached out to her for advice on how to better communicate with the public during the pandemic. In her role as a senior scientific adviser, she says she is trying to change the culture from the inside.
Her challenge at CDC was, “How do we take the data and make it usable, actionable and understandable?”
Jeterina said four years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, there are still some unanswered questions about how government agencies responded to the crisis.
One example Jeterina highlighted was how long it took public health officials to realise the virus was airborne: In the early months of the pandemic, more than 200 scientists signed a letter to the World Health Organisation (WHO) arguing that COVID-19 was spread by airborne particles and droplets, but it took the WHO more than a year to recognise this basic fact, which Jeterina said was a big mistake.
Asked to rate the CDC’s response to the H5 avian flu outbreak that spread from cows to several dairy workers in the United States, Jeterina said he would give it a B-minus.
She praised the agency’s rapid response to avian flu, which included a technical report on genomic testing of human cases, a landing page with numbers, and weekly conference calls with journalists and experts. Jeterina said one of the unique challenges posed by avian flu is that it affects both humans and animals.
Another challenge she foresees is promoting necessary precautions against bird flu, such as masks, which have become politicized during the COVID-19 pandemic.
For those fighting misinformation (which he prefers to call “rumors”), Jeterina takes a stance of trying to persuade people rather than falling into “tribalism”.
“I just really hope that people make the best decisions they can based on evidence, not fear or rumor,” she said.
