Environmental threats increasingly entail important risks from government responses. In considering the risks of a new vector-borne disease, for example, decision-makers must also grapple with potential risks from responses such as the aerial spraying of pesticides. In communicating about these complex risks, public officials often choose different “frames” that promote different conceptualizations of the issue. Yet prior research has paid limited attention to how public officials frame the related risks of the environmental threat and the public response. This paper starts to fill that gap by conducting a content analysis of statements by public officials regarding risks from the threat of a local outbreak of the Zika virus in South Florida in 2016, as well as risks from the response of aerial pesticide spraying. Based on limited prior research, we hypothesize that public officials are likely to have adopted a “risk maximization” frame that stressed the high risks from exposure to Zika, but a “risk trade-off” frame when discussing aerial spraying. In actuality, we find that officials strongly favored a “reassurance” frame that downplayed both types of risks. Based on this analysis, we suggest framing strategies for disease outbreaks and other threats with potentially risky government responses may vary significantly depending on local contexts and that the South Florida experience was a missed opportunity to test the strategy of trade-off framing.

环境威胁越来越需要政府应对措施带来的重要风险。例如，在考虑一种新的病媒传播疾病的风险时，决策者还必须应对空中喷洒杀虫剂等应对措施的潜在风险。在沟通这些复杂的风险时，公职人员经常选择不同的“框架”来促进对问题的不同概念化。然而，先前的研究对公职人员如何构建相关的环境威胁和公众反应的风险。本文开始通过对政府官员关于 2016 年南佛罗里达州当地爆发寨卡病毒威胁的风险以及空中杀虫剂喷洒应对风险的声明进行内容分析来填补这一空白。基于有限的先前研究，我们假设公职人员可能采用“风险最大化”框架，强调暴露于寨卡病毒的高风险，但在讨论空中喷洒时采用“风险权衡”框架。实际上，我们发现官员们强烈支持一种淡化这两种风险的“保证”框架。基于这一分析，