Our model proposes that trust in formal (government and media sources) and informal (from other people) information affects RID epidemic health protective behaviours, the former by informing about generic risk and response characteristics for dealing with a potential threat (causes and protective responses), the latter about threat imminence, severity and response effectiveness (seeing how others behave). We refer to the product of these combined processes as situational awareness, and propose that rather than driving behaviour directly information acts through altering the cognitive/affective domain of situational awareness. Thus the model is predicated on several premises: that understanding of the disease and perceived personal susceptibility influence self-efficacy [17, 18, 31] ; that the effect of perceived susceptibility to influenza on HPBs acts through increasing worry about the disease [26, 33, 38, 41, 42] ; and that more worry from perceived susceptibility prompts HPBs [39, 41, 42] . These cognitive/affective processes are represented in the hypothesized model ( Figure 1 ).