[Communication of health risks: the example of HIV/AIDS prevention]

Those seeking to educate the public about health need to communicate health risks effectively. This involves providing evidence-based information about factors and behaviors that are dangerous to people's health and making recommendations regarding how risks can be avoided or minimized. This communication usually aims to motivate people to act in a way that promotes health or prevents disease. Organized 'health education' that seeks to communicate risks is always embedded in a contextual framework that in turn influences the issues and content to be communicated and the form of communication that is chosen. The scope of available scientific knowledge is an important part of this framework as is the extent to which risks are presented in the media as being dangerous. The media's message has a strong influence on how the public and specific subgroups within it react. The article describes conditions that contribute to successful risk communication based on the example of HIV/AIDS prevention. We chose this particular case because it can serve as an example of how to deal with future epidemics that may potentially generate substantial media coverage. This field report shows how risk communication about HIV/AIDS in the mass media in Germany in the mid-1980s elicited a risk consciousness among the general public that in itself was in danger of becoming a health risk, especially for people affected by the disease, and how 'health education' responded to this challenge. It concludes by describing how these experiences with risk communication can be applied to similar types of risk communication today.