Skip to main content

A 'Dance' Toward Public Health

Cebu Press Freedom Week kicks of this week to remind both readers and journalists on the essential role that the press plays in the local community. Breakthroughs joins the celebration with an inside look of health and science journalism as practiced in a developed country like the United States. There is not much difference in certain ways.

LET us pause this week from hard medical science to join in the celebration of the Press Freedom Week. But don’t you know that health journalism is much like dancing?

The relationship between the journalist and his or her source is much like an ever-unfolding dance. A sweat-breaking ballroom dancing, you might say. The sources seek access to the journalist to get their findings across; the journalist seeks access to the sources to do his job. Nowadays, huge stores of authoritative sources are available especially through the Internet. But the latest ones are mostly scientific reports that are hardly understandable to the average reader.

The news media translates this hard info into “forms easily disseminated to and understood by the public,” says Sherrie Flynt Wallington of the Harvard School of Public Health (Boston, Massachusetts, USA).

Wallington and colleagues conducted a review on the health reporters and editors in the United States to get their source profiles and bases for framing their health reports. The Journal for Health Communication published their findings in January last year.

The team found out that journalists with a bachelor’s degree or less (compared to those with master’s degree or more) use... [Read more]


This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 21 September 2011.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Deadly X-Gene Mutants

A RECENT study on macrophages (i.e. defensive cells in our body that engulf threatening substances inside our body) introduced me to a lethal, genetic disease that targets the male population. This disease is called Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), named after the French neurologist Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne, who described it in 1861. While it has an incidence of one in 3,500 newborn males, health experts consider this as the most common lethal disease of childhood around the world. Mutation in the male (X) chromosome [dystrophin gene, locus Xp21] causes a rapid degeneration of the muscles, leading into an eventual loss of walking ability and then death. While females do not exhibit symptoms, they can be carriers of these defective genes, especially if the father had this condition or the mother is also a carrier. Symptoms usually appear before age five; at times visible in early infancy. These symptoms involve... ( Read more .)  This article appears in Sun-Star Ce...
Post a Comment
Read more

Joy, Temperance and Repose

“I RECKON being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh (1903). The term “antioxidant” was originally used in the 18th century to refer to a chemical that prevents the consumption of oxygen in laboratory experiments. However, in the late 19th and early 20th century, extensive study exploded... ( Read more ) This article appeared in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 02 June 2010.
Post a Comment
Read more