When to go public about health warnings – like potential outbreaks of foodborne disease – remains contentious. And no one is willing to come clean about it and say – this is when we go public and why. Or at least write it down. Bureaucrat 101 – write it down, have to do it; so don’t write it down.

I understand the flexibility public health types require to do their jobs effectively, but much of the public outrage surrounding various outbreaks – salmonella in tomatoes/jalapenos, 2008, listeria in Maple Leaf deli meats, 2008, the various leafy green recalls and outbreaks of 2010, and the delay in clamping down on Iowa eggs – can be traced to screw ups in going public.

It’s long been a tenet of risk communication that it is better to default to early public information rather than later. People can handle all kinds of information, especially when they are informed in an honest and forthright manner. In new research that seems directly applicable to going public about foodborne illness outbreaks, two mathematical biologists at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia reported today that at the first sign of a disease pandemic, public health officials should begin strongly communicating about the extent of the outbreak and the steps that can be taken by the public to avoid infection

During outbreaks of serious infectious diseases, many individuals closely follow media reports and as a result, take precautions to protect themselves against the disease. These precautions may include staying home, getting vaccinated, avoiding crowds, using disinfectants, canceling travel plans and wearing face masks.

Known as "self-isolation," these precautions can significantly reduce the severity of an outbreak, according to mathematical modeling done by "The more forcefully the media provides information about pandemic infections and deaths, the more the total number of infections is reduced," said Howard Weiss, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Mathematics. "Media coverage also reduces the maximum number of infections at any particular time, which is important for allocating the resources needed for treating infectious diseases."

The benefit of publicly reporting disease outbreaks seems obvious, and public health officials in the United States have a policy of regularly communicating with the news media about such incidents. But according to Weiss, not all world governments choose to communicate so well – and nobody had used rigorous mathematical techniques to study the impact of that communication before.

In a paper about the model submitted to a biostatistics journal and posted on the Physics arXiv blog, Mummert and Weiss describe testing their model with a hypothetical outbreak of Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever in Huntington – a college community of about 50,000 residents.

In their model, Mummert and Weiss did not look at such issues as the quality of news coverage, or what may happen if news reports turn out to be false or overstated. They also didn’t study the effect of individuals occasionally leaving their isolation to purchase food or medicine, for instance.

The paper cites the case of a false rumor spread across the Internet in 2003 about a restaurant worker in New York’s Chinatown who had supposedly died of the SARS infection. That rumor led to a decrease in travel to that area.

"In general, our advice to public health officials anywhere in the world is not to hold back," he added. "They should get out the news about infectious disease outbreaks loudly and quickly. It’s clear that vigorous media reporting can have a substantial effect on reducing the impact of an outbreak."