130 RüdigerKunow
is a rare infectiousdisease thatcan crossthespeciesbarrier and belife-
threatening, also to humans. A number of deaths in the Baltimore MD
area in the holiday season of 1929/1930 soon caught the attention of
national media. Starting with a Washington Post headline "'Parrot'
Disease Baffles Experts" (8 Jan. 1930) a veritable media craze
developed.
As the story grew, it took on certain familiar—and as it turned out,
durable—features, features that borrow as much from pulp fiction as
from public health, super scientists fight super bugs in race to defeat
foreign menace invading American homes, beneath the Christmas tree.
(Leporen.pag.)And the story did in fact grow, into a national mass media
emergency. Three days later,TheSanFranciscoExaminer'sfront page
came out with the news that "[t]he disease-fighting armament of the
nationtodaywasdirectedagainstanewandmysteriousenemy"(Lepore
n. pag.). As it soon turned out, the enemy was neither new nor
mysterious; doctors had long known aboutpsittacosis,only thatnobody
outside the medical field had cared much about an infectious disease
whose number of cases had in medical memory always remained low.
And in less than a week after the initial alarm, the specter of a mass
infection of Americans under the Christmas tree dissolved when the
mediaannouncedthatpsittacosiswasnormally notdangerousto human
beings. "Parrot Fever" was more a media than a medical disease.
Coverage here as in many later cases was almost always in advance of
the actual presence of the disease and certainly in excess of the dangers
itposed.
The agenda-setting function of the media (noted by Walter
Lippmann, one of the "founding fathers" of American Studies),
medicalpanics:"Therehavebeenhundredsofnationalmenaces,...keepingthe
populace feeling the national pulse and applying the national stethoscope.
Psittacosis is one the best, because one of the most picturesque. What will
probably happen will be that some reporter will invent a disease traceable to
something that happens to everybody: 'Otis heart' from rising in elevators,
maybe, or 'corn-flakes itch' from eating breakfast food, and we'll all die of
autosuggestion"(n.pag.).