Swine flu or H1N1 flu?

We take great effort to provide thorough, authoritative health information to our customers. We know it's also important that our information is empowering and to do that it must be accessible, meaning we need to use the language you use. That's easy to say but sometimes harder in practice.

Let me tell you a little story ...

On Friday evening, April 24, our Editor in Chief realized the reports about swine flu coming from Mexico seemed likely to create an interest in authoritative information about this disease. Our editorial team jumped into action over the weekend, drafting a report called Swine Flu: How to understand your risk and protect your health. By Monday afternoon we had the report completed, as well as a Q&A, a newspaper column, and a video. By Tuesday morning the report was prepared and available for sale on our website. Pretty good for an organization that is used to turning out things on a monthly or quarterly basis.

This past Tuesday afternoon, we published the second edition of that report, updating it to reflect new information and new research. By the time we went to publish the second edition, the Federal government, purportedly under pressure from the pig farming industry, was referring to the disease as H1N1, which refers to the type of virus. I was surprised that H1N1 actually seemed to get picked up by some government officials and media very quickly.

But, most people were still referring to it as "swine flu." So, as publishers, what do we do? We want to use the official language but we also have to use the language our customers want. In the end we went with "Swine (H1N1) Flu" as the main title. It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue but let's face it, in the face of personal health concerns, people are probably more interested in solid, authoritative health information than examples of sparkling literature.

This recalled for me a similar dilemma we had a number of years ago when the medical community moved away from the term "hormone replacement therapy" or "HRT" in favor of simply "hormone therapy." This was not some arbitrary change but reflects the fact that many horomone treatments are not technically "replacements." We jumped to use the new terminology to reinforce that we are thorough and up to date in our research. Unfortunately, the general public, to this day, predomoninantly still refers to HRT and hormone replacement therapy. We've made appropriate adjustments.

Sometimes it's challenging to be both authoritative and accessible.


* If you want, find more about our swine flu, er, 2009 H1N1 Type A Influenza report.

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