The world feels increasingly risky to Michael Cherkasky. David Armstrong, The San Francisco Chronicle, 4 Dec. Frangialli criticized the news media for creating an ' infodemic'' of speculative reports about SARS. 'We must ensure that people are not deterred from traveling without good reason,'' said Francesco Frangialli, secretary general of the U.N. The United Nations World Tourism Organization … said panicking at the threat of bird flu could endanger the global travel industry…. In the years between its coinage and its current new prominence the word was used only sporadically: This one employs information in a way that mirrors such late 20th-century coinages as infographic and infomercial, and the -demic of epidemic and pandemic. Blends, words formed by combining other words or word parts, are very popular. It is a phenomenon we have seen with greater frequency in recent years-not only in our reaction to SARS, for example, but also in our response to terrorism and even to relatively minor occurrences such as shark sightings. What exactly do I mean by the ' infodemic'? A few facts, mixed with fear, speculation and rumor, amplified and relayed swiftly worldwide by modern information technologies, have affected national and international economies, politics and even security in ways that are utterly disproportionate with the root realities. Rothkopf goes on to clarify what he means by the word: That is because it is not the viral epidemic but rather an 'information epidemic' that has transformed SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, from a bungled Chinese regional health crisis into a global economic and social debacle.… he information epidemic-or ' infodemic'-has made the public health crisis harder to control and contain. SARS is the story of not one epidemic but two, and the second epidemic, the one that has largely escaped the headlines, has implications that are far greater than the disease itself. It was coined as a blend of information and epidemic in 2003 by journalist and political scientist David Rothkopf in a Washington Post column, when the world's attention was on the current crisis's less terrifying relation: The United Nations Department of Global Communications (DGC), UN.org, 28 Mar. Infodemics can hamper an effective public health response and create confusion and distrust among people. They can spread misinformation, disinformation and rumours during a health emergency. WHO explains that infodemics are an excessive amount of information about a problem, which makes it difficult to identify a solution. The word is uncommon enough that its use typically requires explanation beyond a simple gloss: “We’re not just fighting an epidemic we’re fighting an infodemic,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) at a gathering of foreign policy and security experts in Munich, Germany, in mid-February, referring to fake news that “spreads faster and more easily than this virus.” We don't enter infodemic yet, but it's a word we're closely watching, because it's appearing in some prominent places:

Another word that shares an element with them is also getting busy: infodemic.

The words epidemic and pandemic have been, as of this article's writing in the spring of 2020, far busier in recent months than anyone wants them to be. The word was coined in a 2003 Washington Post column by David Rothkopf.

Infographic definition