Since the major swine flue outbreak occured around June in world wide, there are so many people infected.
In Japan, more than 10 people, including the latest case of a 24-year-old lady in Okinawa, have died from H1N1 flue.
In the beggining of this outbreak, around June, there was no one infected in Japan whears so many people suffered all over the county especially in Mexico. Japanese government stated that they contunied conducting the thermography test at the airport, which they believed they were preventing the outbreak in Japan effectively.
However, within a week or two, the situation got changed 180 degree. Japanese people began to be infected with swine flue everywhere. As following the issue of the outbreak in Japan, Japanese government held a media press conference, admitting that they did not conduct thermography test on not every single plane because there were too many planes that arrived in Japan every single day, because Especially around that season, Japan faced a big vacation holiday season.
Along with that fact, not checking every single plane comes from abroad, Japanese government started a campaign of lowering the cost of using highways in nation wide, even though they should have promoted that people should not be shuffled. At that time, the Japanese cabinet faced a difficulty of winning in the election in Aug, 2009, they focused on "pleasing" the Japanese citizens by lowering high way fees. Thus, They conducted a great amount of PR for launching the campaign on TV or even at locations like department stores or parks to make the campaign aware to the citizens while the government did not spend much time for media outreach of a swine flu information.
The way that the government conducted media conferences was also problematic. When the Japanese government held media conferences regarding a swine flu outbreak, they only mentioned how many people got infected or how many people have died at where. On the other hand, I believe what Japanese people wanted to know was that how dangerous the flu is, how to prevent from getting the H1N1 flu, or some other kinds of effective informations on top of the statistic of the situation.
Even though I cannot say the PR failure can be the only cause of the major outbreak of a great amount of people's death from a swine flue, I am sure if Japanese government has chosen the right one to promote as well as conducted a right PR campaign, many precious lives could be saved.
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2 comments:
I was pretty sure that Japan was introduced to swine flu in May when a couple of teenage girls returned home from New York City with the bug. In a three-day period, the number of cases had gone up to over 200 people.
Initially the Japanese government seemed to be doing a lot to contain the spread of the disease. Prime Minister Taro Aso started a special committee to prevent further spreading of H1N1 and urged the public not to panic. He also mandated that all planes arriving from Mexico, the U.S. and Canada receive on-board health screenings. So when you say that not every plane was screened for H1N1, do you mean that the mandatory flights arriving from these North American countries were not screened? If so, then policy was definitely violated. If flights from other countries were not screened, then there is not necessarily a violation.
If Japan really failed to educate citizens about the spread of H1N1, that may have something to do with a loss of revenue. Because of how quickly the epidemic spread through Japan, malls were closed, flights were canceled and many schools were shut down. As a result many shop owners, malls and tourism departments lost a lot of money. It may seem radical to say that perhaps the Japanese government skimped on spreading the word about contamination on purpose, but it is possible that the "PR failure" was an attempt to prevent panic among the Japanese people to maintain revenue and keep the economy from suffering.
The japan experience with the H1N1 virus seems much different than that here in the U.S. maybe PR is attributed to our success.
Although, I personally feel as if H1N1 has been given too much attention in the U.S. The numbers seem relatively low compared to the regular flu.
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