Introduction: Broadcasting socially important information, including that on infectious disease outbreaks, news agencies are one of the key open sources of epidemic intelligence.
Objective: To compare news items on World Health Organization priority pathogens published by Russian and foreign news agencies.
Materials and methods: Using the variants of the names of World Health Organization priority pathogens as search queries, among all Google search results on the websites of four agencies (Associated Press, Reuters, Novosti Russian Information Agency, and TASS Russian News Agency) we found 714 news items published in 2018–2022 that have one of the following diseases as the main topic: Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever; Ebola virus disease, Marburg virus disease, Lassa fever, Middle East respiratory syndrome, Nipah and henipavirus infections, Rift Valley fever, and Zika fever. We carried out a quantitative (number of news items) and qualitative (topics) content analysis of the sample comparing the findings by agency and pathogen.
Results: Each news agency accounted for 20 to 30 % of the sample (approximately 57 % in case of foreign ones), with greater genre diversity among foreign agencies. The vast majority of news items across all agencies were on Ebola (506 stories in total), while in 27 instances the number of the agency news stories on the pathogen was less than 20, and the largest gap between the news agencies regarding the number of the news stories on a single pathogen was seventeen fold (for Lassa). Disease incidence was the predominant topic of the news items.
Discussion: Russian and foreign news agencies provided similarly intensive and topically diverse news flows on World Health Organization priority pathogens, with frequent non-reporting on different outbreaks (except for Ebola and Marburg virus diseases), and complemented each other with information relevant to Russian and Western audiences, respectively.
