Environmental health risk communication in the case "Terra dei Fuochi": content analysis of online newspaper articles

Background: The aim of the study is to evaluate the way in which information is conveyed by one of the major national newspapers, in its online version, Repubblica. it, about health risks associated with the "Terra dei Fuochi". Methods: A retrospective systematic search in the online newspaper database was carried out for articles published from 1st January through 13th May 2014. The keyword used was "Terra dei Fuochi". A corpus, containing all articles included, was built in order to perform content analysis and text-mining using the T-LAB software, together with a critical interpretation. The co-occurrence analysis was performed using the keywords: environment, prevention, waste, risk and science. Results: A total of 211 articles were retrieved, but only 188 articles met the inclusion criteria and were included in the analysis. The section of publication with the largest number of articles was represented by Repubblica Napoli edition with 50% of articles, whereas, only 2% of articles were included in the Environment section, and no article has been placed in the Health section. The most occurring lemmas were: waste, Naples, President, environmental - environment and health. Lemmas as disaster, drama, alarm and fear occur with medium frequency. Among the lemmas with less occurrence there were: remediation, cancer, people, information and recycle. However, terms as communication and risk management were absent. Conclusions: This study contributes to our understanding of how environmental health risks associated with the "Terra dei Fuochi" issue are presented by the newspapers to the public, which has implications for how the public may learn about risk management information.