Abstract

This study investigates ‘risk’ as discussed in news coverage and in relation to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP): a treatment that has been proven to restrict the transmission of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). In the U.S. and the U.K. & Ireland, there are issues concerning the provision and take-up of PrEP, which can lead to health inequalities. Raising awareness and tackling stigma are priorities in ensuring that those who would benefit from PrEP can access it, since these are reported to be obstacles to potential users seeking out the treatment. The media has been shown to be an important resource for public understanding of health issues and there is evidence to suggest that the news media have contributed to the uncertainty and stigma around PrEP, which has discouraged some from supporting and taking PrEP. In this study, I examine a corpus of 1424 news articles on PrEP (1,017,743 words) from the U.S. and the U.K. & Ireland, in the period 2016–2019. Using methods from corpus linguistics, I show that forms of ‘risk’ appear to a statistically significant degree in the data, providing a quantitative basis on which to explore these in more detail. Focusing on publications that use a high proportion of 'risk' words (compared with the overall average), I show that the focus on various risks associated with PrEP differs according to publication and that references to ‘risk’ are used both to advocate for the wider provision of PrEP and to caution against the effects of providing PrEP, i.e. concerns about ‘risk compensation’. Corpus methods are shown to augment existing studies of PrEP coverage, providing a systematic method for identifying recurrent lexical features in the data and thereby showing how we can report the linguistic aspects of risk representation.

CDC, Centres for Disease Control and Prevention; HIV, Human immunodeficiency virus; NAT, National Aids Trust; PrEP, Pre-exposure prophylaxis; WHO, World Health Organisation.

摘要

本研究调查了新闻报道中讨论的“风险”以及与暴露前预防 (PrEP) 相关的“风险”：一种已被证明可以限制人类免疫缺陷病毒 (HIV) 传播的治疗方法。在美国、英国和爱尔兰，在提供和接受 PrEP 方面存在问题，这可能导致健康不平等。提高认识和解决污名是确保那些将从 PrEP 中受益的人能够获得它的优先事项，因为据报道这些是潜在用户寻求治疗的障碍。媒体已被证明是公众了解健康问题的重要资源，有证据表明，新闻媒体助长了 PrEP 的不确定性和污名，这阻碍了一些人支持和接受 PrEP。在这项研究中，我检查了 2016-2019 年期间来自美国、英国和爱尔兰的 1424 篇关于 PrEP 的新闻文章（1,017,743 字）的语料库。使用语料库语言学的方法，我表明“风险”的形式在数据中出现了具有统计学意义的程度，为更详细地探索这些提供了定量基础。着眼于使用高比例“风险”词的出版物（与总体平均水平相比），我表明对与 PrEP 相关的各种风险的关注因出版物而异，并且提到“风险”都用于倡导更广泛地提供 PrEP 并警告提供 PrEP 的影响，即对“风险补偿”的担忧。语料库方法被证明可以增强现有的 PrEP 覆盖率研究，

CDC，疾病控制和预防中心；HIV，人类免疫缺陷病毒；NAT，国家艾滋病信托基金；PrEP，暴露前预防；世界卫生组织，世界卫生组织。