Stanford Radio

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: "Seema Yasmin: How to conquer a pandemic with communication" A specialist in reporting on epidemics — and a medical doctor to boot — explains why bad information is an enemy of public health. Seema Yasmin is a rarity in public health: a medical doctor who is also a journalist. As such, she’s seen a lot, from Ebola in West Africa to SARS and MERS, and now COVID-19, the most serious pandemic in a century. Yasmin is currently director of research and education at the Stanford Center for Health Communication. From her years in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — a group widely described as “the disease detectives” — and as a reporter for The Dallas Morning News, Yasmin says that the greatest impediment to halting an outbreak is the rapid spread of bad information, and even abject disinformation, which when abetted by social media can spread faster than the disease itself. To halt the pandemic, she says medical sc