Narrator: This is Science Today. Media campaigns have helped increase public awareness of heart attack symptoms and treatment, but what hasn't changed is the delay time in seeking help - which can lead to significant heart damage. Because of this, Kathleen Dracup of the University of California, San Francisco, is proposing a national intervention program very much like a fire drill.

Dracup: The analogy is a very similar one - if you think about a fire occurring in your house, the first reaction is panic. You wake up to smoke and what to do? But the American public has been taught is rehearse what you would do. And similarly, we believe that by emotionally rehearsing and giving people the steps to take in a one-to-one where we can actually personalize the information, that we may be more successful than the media campaigns because we're not only dealing with knowledge, but we're dealing with behavior.

Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.