Suggestions for establishing a sustainable risk communication platform for carcinogenic factors.

Given the steady increase in the number of cancer patients and media reports on controversial carcinogens related to occupation and lifestyle, people’s interest in cancer is growing. Since the Korean government pledged to overcome cancer, establishing its “Conquering Cancer 10-Year Plan” in 1966, the “Conquering Cancer” policy has achieved an increased cancer survival rate; however, the number of cancer patients is constantly increasing, due to the factors of aging, lifestyle, and environment. Of those people who achieve the average life expectancy (77 years for men and 84 years for women), it is estimated that two out of five men (38.1%) and one out of three women (33.8%) will suffer from cancer [1]. Under these circumstances, recent media reports on the carcinogens found in everyday products such as drinks, bags, and sportswear—as well as an announcement by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) about the carcinogenicity of diesel combustion—have caused national repercussions and a debate about cancer risks. Individuals’ ability to communicate about various health risks through a variety of media, digital devices, and widespread social network services (SNS) has enabled social discourse and arguments to develop at a much faster rate than would have been the case in the age of traditional media. Topics addressed during various debates about carcinogens have ranged from the impact of short-term and local factors to the damage caused by longer-term and global factors. It is common for many risks faced in modern society (the “risk society”) to develop uncontrollably, even if they start as short-term or disconnected risks. Risk communications in modern society can be described as a long-term, complicated form of communication, in which various agents are intricately connected with one another—not the simple, one-way communication style of a single agent (for example, the government) communicating with the general public. This trend is increasingly reinforced through the development of new media such as the Internet, mobile devices, and SNS. For this reason, communications related to carcinogenic risk factors may evolve to an uncontrollable level because of one-sided media coverage and people’s excessive production of SNS messages. The most significant factors include the following: the gap between the risk perceptions of experts, government, and the general public; the general public’s lack of professional knowledge; the understanding imbalance between the expert group and the general public. All of these factors increase people’s distrust of information delivery and amplify their anxiety about risk factors. A process of agreement through mutual communication is therefore needed, essentially because social discourse about risk issues (being closely connected to socially formed value issues) cannot be created solely on the basis of objective, expert technical judgments. To establish national strategies for communicating carcinogenic risk factors to the public, while building a virtuous system of communication agents who can speak on behalf of the public, industry, media, and governments (including public institutions), researchers need to explore the following considerations: first, the ways in which information related to carcinogenic factors will flow; second, when and how people’s awareness, knowledge and attitudes toward carcinogenic factors are formed, together with how they change and respond; and third, when and how agents of communication at the national level should respond. The US has established an extensive survey data network called the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS), which provides data on how people use health facts, as well as information on various cancers, health communications, health service and Internet use, social networking, smoking, doctor-patient communications, sports, and nutrition. The HINTS was established by the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, an organization affiliated with the National Cancer Institute (NCI). NCI established HINTS because the rapidly changing environment for health communications led to an awareness of the monitoring problem. There was also a consensus on the need to examine people’s awareness of, attitude toward, and knowledge about various types of cancer, as well as their understanding of the environments available to effectively manage cancer. If surveys are conducted and analyzed continuously, it will become possible to systemically analyze people’s information data usage patterns and problems, as well as health communication differences in relation to types of cancer and the impact of the media on people. Developed countries actively conduct studies using big data to analyze and predict social issues in various ways. It is acknowledged that big data analysis can help detect developing risk issues, negative public opinions, and controversies, reducing the social costs of responding and acting to improve people’s quality of life and solve worldwide problems. One typical example involves Google, the global search engine, which, in 2009, calculated the frequency of search queries related to the flu, predicted flu activities in many countries around the world, and made its service available to users. In addition to these structured analyses, unstructured SNS-driven big data analysis has emerged as a central issue that currently influences various aspects of the public and private sectors. A study by Sadilek et al. [2] on big data processing showed how Twitter was used to identify disease factors, track the path of infection between individuals, and predict the spread of infectious diseases. Global positioning system (GPS)-tagged tweets (approximately 4.5 million), a subset of the 16 million tweets collected, were analyzed to extract those containing disease-related terms. From these, it was possible to derive a correlation between places where people with a disease factor were co-located, the size of their social networks, and their likelihood of contracting a disease. In the meantime, a study by Christakis & Fowler [3] that had been collecting data for 32 years, persuasively argued that the prevalence of obesity might partly be influenced by one’s social network. Between 1971 and 2003, the body mass index of 12,067 people in a specific area were collected and analyzed to assess whether their weight changes were correlated with the weight changes of friends, family members, neighbors, and other people around them. These studies indicate the need to consider SNS data in assessing potential health risks in the society.