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  • Essay / Risk Communication Concept - 1203

    Risk Communication ConceptCommunication is an exchange of thoughts, messages and information by speech, visual, signal, writing or behavior between two or more living creatures (Wikipedia, 2013). The purpose of communication is to inform, educate, and sometimes even persuade. Furthermore, risk is the potential for exposure to harm, and it is triggered by the production of irresponsibility in the world (Rohrmann, 2008). Furthermore, the risks involved in the level of encounter of individuals or groups in the future as well as the possibility of injury and risk also involve the public's cognitive judgments about this possibility (Cox, 2006). Risk perception arises from the modernization process of human decision-making, characterized by a high degree of uncertainty. The risks sometimes communicated frighten certain audiences. Other times, the public is unaware of the risks, or even apathetic. In other cases, some organizations have proven to have little credibility in communicating risks to a certain section of the public; or even certain audiences consider the management of certain risks unacceptable. The strong emotion or lack of emotion that the public associates with risks can make communication difficult (Lundgren and McMakin, 2009; Cox, 2006). Arguments about potential risk rarely arise from simple communication problems, but faulty communication often becomes a factor allowing concerns to grow and opposing groups to become polarized (Bennett, Calman, & Curtis, 2010). The exchange of information about potential hazards in response to increasing environmental hazards between experts and the public about what constitutes “acceptable risk” is called risk communication (Bennett, Calman, & Curtis, 2010). Risk communication often begins with a hazard, or potential harm or danger. to the environment or to the health and safety of society (Lundgren and McMakin, 2009; Lindell and Perry, 2004). The example includes the spread of an infectious disease, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), from Asia to 24 countries in February 2003, which created public health challenges (Abraham, 2006). The emergence of SARS risk communication stems from the recognition of the dangers in which the public tends to exchange information and evaluate actions to take in order to avoid undesirable outcomes (Lindell and Perry, 2004). One of the frightening aspects of SARS was the spread of the disease through casual human-to-human contact (Wright, 2008). Risk communication therefore played a vital role in exchanging information that the public needed to protect themselves from disease and reduce the risk of transmission (Abraham, 2006; Wright, 2008). In most situations, risk communication is most appropriate to inform, encourage or persuade the building of consensus between parties on a range of areas, including risk levels, the importance or significance of certain risks and decisions, actions or policies intended to manage or control. certain risks (Lundgren & McMakin, 2009).