Disease as Enemy: Journalistic Discourse Analysis about Dengue Fever

Abstract

Dengue fever is one of the current concerns of Brazilian public health. It emerged and became well known in Brazil in the 1980s, when successive outbreaks were registered in several cities. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the media treatment given to dengue fever, a disease that is increasingly affecting Brazilian people. Starting from the explosive outbreak recorded in 2002, we seek to understand the discourse construction about the disease, by evaluating the discursive strategies used in 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008. We selected 291 news published in Jornal do Commercio, a daily newspaper of Recife (State of Pernambuco), about the situation of dengue and linked them to the notifications of the disease recorded by the Health Department of Pernambuco. The increase of cases and fatalities has a strong journalistic appeal, requiring an almost daily narrative of the events related to the disease’s threat. The notion of outbreak built over the centuries is essential to analyze the effects of signification produced nowadays about infectious diseases as dengue fever. Moreover the discourse of militarization observed in the media through war metaphors is commonly used to emphasize the fear and the necessity of adoption of preventive practices.