With a topic as serious and potentially panic-inducing as the Zika virus, reporters have a heightened obligation to present new research findings accurately and in context.

Of the dozens of stories I scanned about a new report on Zika-associated birth defects, only NPR rose to this challenge.

In lockstep with a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention news release, almost all of the other stories I looked at emphasized that “1 in 10 pregnant women” with Zika gave birth to babies with birth defects.

But how many actual women does the “1 in 10” figure represent? How many actual babies with birth defects?

You have to wade far down into all of these stories to find the numbers, whereas NPR puts them right in its headline:

The fact that 1 in 10 women with Zika have babies with birth defects is accurate but not nearly as informative as it could be.

And when communicating to a general audience, it’s misleading to the point of scaremongering to make the “1 in 10” headline the take-home message from the study.

“Since the reader doesn’t know how many pregnant women were affected by Zika, ‘1 in 10’ could mean anything in terms of absolute babies affected and presumably scares many people,” said Dr. Mirjam Jenny, Head Research Scientist at the Harding Center for Risk Literacy in Berlin. “People need to know that an absolute number of 51 babies were affected. Only communicating the rate is irresponsible.”

(Note: all of these stories and the CDC news release did include the absolute numbers in their coverage, though in most cases it was far down in the text. None called attention to the small number of women affected or tried to place the numbers in context.)

Comparisons can help readers make sense of the risks

The issue was initially brought to my attention by Twitter tipster Leah Rosenbaum, who’s in a dual journalism/public health master’s degree program at the University of California, Berkeley.

Alarmist headline buries the lede- the actual number of confirmed zika birth defects in the US is 24. https://t.co/a0oU9ytRs6 @nytimes — Leah Rosenbaum (@leah_rosenbaum) April 5, 2017

When I asked her to expand on this via email and comment on the difference between the Times and NPR coverage she wrote:

I liked the NPR piece a lot better; they framed the numbers in a way that emphasized that the disease isn’t slowing down, but also kept the numbers in perspective. I particularly liked that they compared the numbers from Zika infections to other common infections like CMV–how often is that in the news? …Yesterday BBC put out an article about how smoking causes 1 in 10 total deaths worldwide–that’s a HUGE number! 51 babies in the entire US born with Zika-related birth defects (and only 24 confirmed) is tragic, but not on the same scale.

As Rosenbaum points out, the NPR piece notes that “each year about 8,000 babies are born in the U.S. with disabilities because of infection with cytomegalovirus, or CMV. And in general, birth defects from all causes affect more than 100,000 babies in the U.S. each year, the CDC reports.”

Kudos to NPR for going the extra mile here. They dug deep and decided not to present the statistic that would raise the most eyebrows, but the statistic that raised the right point: an absolute number that provides the information in context.