PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES AND PUBLIC HEALTH:
THE "MAD COW" AFFAIR IN ITALIAN NEWSPAPERS
Nicola Petrosillo, Maria Stella Aloisi, Enrico Girardi, Lucilla Rava, and Giuseppe Ippolito
Centro di Riferimento AIDS e Servizio di Epidemiologia delle Malattie Infettive, Via Portuense, 292, 00149 Rome, Italy
Objective: The aim of this hypothesis-generating study was to analyze the relative impact on the news media of
new medical information that is not subjected to peer review vs information first published in peer-reviewed journals.
Design: We performed an analysis of reports on Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in Italian newspapers.
On March 20, 1996, the British Secretary of State for Health announced that a new variant of CJD had been identified in 10 people.
On April 6, 1996, an article describing these cases of variant CJD was published in The Lancet (Will RG, Ironside JW, Zeidler M, et al.
A new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in the UK. Lancet. 1996;347: 921-925). We reviewed the 7 newspapers with the widest circulation in Italy,
and by hand search we identified all articles related to the "mad cow" published between March 21 and May 10, 1996. Each item was classified according
to date of publication, page of publication, and proportion of page occupied.
Results: We collected 535 articles, of which 62 (11.6%) appeared on the front page. Following the first news released,
the number of articles published each day rapidly increased, peaking on March 26 with 48 items and 1 article on the front page
of all the newspapers considered. During the 7-week period considered, 72% of all the articles and 88.7% of those on the front page
were published in the first 2 weeks, before The Lancet publication. Median daily page proportion of articles on each newspaper
was 0.63, 0.43 and 0.10 in the first, second, and third weeks of the study, respectively.
Conclusions: Our analysis suggests that when peer-reviewed research is published after a health risk is disclosed to the public,
its impact on media is small. We think that in these cases, the peer-review process should be expedited as much as possible to give the
public opinion and the health decision-makers scientifically sound and timely information on problems of great relevance to public health.
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