Further to Dr Adirieje's message about health information in times of emergencies, such as a pandemic, or (now) Ebola, it is striking that countries still haven't included strategies to deal with information disorders/fake news (misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, rumours, conspiracy theories, etc.) in their national emergency plans.
It may not be generally known, but every country has a formal emergency plan to cope with national disasters (not just health issues, but including earthquakes, eruptions, nuclear disasters, war...). For example, see “How the UK responds to a national emergency” (https://www.preparedbritain.co.uk/guides/how-uk-responds-to-emergencies), which is broken down into such official government components a downstream gas and electricity (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-emergency-plan-downs...) and fuel (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/energy-emergency-plans-priori...).
However, having researched this, I believe that no country has as yet formulated a national emergency plan specifically dealing with information disorders. Why not? As we saw in the pandemic, and as we are witnessing again with Ebola, the information system is always left to function completely at random, open to assault by any crackpot wielding a keyboard on the internet. This clearly erodes trust in science as a whole, not to mention belief in the efforts of the governments that are attempting to apply it to deal with the emergency.
WHO has done excellent work in formulating strategies to deal with health information, and there are other good sources for tackling other information disorders. However, it is now urgent and imperative that procedures for responding to information disorders are written into the national emergency plans of every country.
Best,
Chris
Chris Zielinski
Centre for Global Health, University of Winchester, UK
Past President and Board Member, World Association of Medical Editors (WAME)
Blogs; http://ziggytheblue.wordpress.com and http://ziggytheblue.tumblr.com
Publications: http://www.researchgate.net and https://winchester.academia.edu/ChrisZielinski/
HIFA profile: Chris Zielinski: Chris is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Winchester and Past President of the World Association of Medical Editors. Chris has held senior positions in publishing and knowledge management at WHO, where he served on WHO’s Ethical Review Committee and originated the African Health Observatory. During his time as Chief Executive of the UK Authors Licensing and Collecting Society, Chris was a director of the UK Copyright Licensing Agency, Educational Recording Agency, and International Association of Audiovisual Writers and Directors. Earlier, he founded ExtraMED to publish developing country medical journals on CD-ROM. Recent activities include papers on AI, and acting as lead author of the WAME guidelines (https://wame.org/page3.php?id=106). A major project has been to encourage hundreds of journals worldwide to publish editorials on nuclear risk and climate change (https://www.ifipnews.org/the-multi-journal-editorial-project/). chris AT chriszielinski.com. His publications are at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Chris-Zielinski and his blog is http://ziggytheblue.wordrpress.com