Infendemic: proposing a new construct for chronic information disorder

The infodemic — an overabundance of information during a health crisis — has shaped a decade of public health thinking, but it rests on an assumption that information disorder is episodic, triggered by emergencies and subsiding with them. That assumption no longer holds. This paper proposes the infendemic: a sustained, endemic state of pervasive, mixed-quality health information that operates continuously in the absence of any triggering crisis - in short a chronic information disorder. This construct stands in the same relation to the infodemic as an endemic disease does to an epidemic. We argue the infendemic's frontline is the health professional, who — unlike the lay public — is not a passive recipient but an active node obliged to detect questionable information, to resist transmitting it, and to correct it within the patient encounter. This obligation exposes a distinction the infodemic frame misses: between veracity (is the information true?) and safety (is acting on it safe for this patient?), since true, authoritative information can be dangerous when applied without context — a hazard amplified at scale by AI-generated, context-stripped health content. We introduce infoculation — psychological inoculation re-targeted from falsehood to unsafe application and embedded in professional curricula — as the preventive response, and call for conceptual recognition, curriculum integration, and sustained surveillance of the chronic information environment.