Institutional popularization of medical knowledge: the case of pandemic influenza A (H1N1)

Because of the way in which the media industry covered news about the pandemic level of H1N1 established by the World Health Organization (WHO), local institutions were advised by WHO to adopt strategic communication plans to inform citizens about the real nature of the spread of the novel influenza A (H1N1) virus. This required a popularization of both scientific and institutional knowledge in lay discourse. The language of popularization has been the object of in-depth investigation from various perspectives. The overall idea is that it is not a distorted simplification of scientific knowledge for non-specialists but rather a reformulation and re-contextualization of scientific knowledge in a more direct form because of the different agents, voices and genres in action. Starting from this assumption, the present research aims at disclosing how and to what extent scientific knowledge is rendered in popularized language by institutions in order to recommend behaviours to be adopted by the population for the purpose of stopping the spread of the influenza A (H1N1) virus. The study analyses four posters targeting a young readership aged from six to twenty, and belonging to the campaign adopted by the UK and Italian Health Ministries to prevent further diffusion of the virus. The investigation seems to suggest that, across cultures, there are differences in the communication strategies adopted to render scientific knowledge into efficacious popularized language.