Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: From Africa to America, lack of public trust makes disease outbreaks worse
Laura H. Kahn, author and research scholar at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, discusses the importance of trust in controlling disease outbreaks, writing, “Vaccines are the best strategy we have against Ebola in Congo, measles in the United States, and other biothreats such as pandemic influenza and newly emerging pathogens. But if the public doesn’t trust them, or the people administering them, or the officials making policy, it will be extremely difficult to contain any outbreak no matter how effective the vaccines themselves are. Honest communication by trusted elected officials is essential, literally, to our survival” (1/28).