Einstein Public Health Blog

Paul Marantz, M.D., M.P.H.
Director, Center for Public Health Sciences
Associate Dean, Clinical Research Education

There was a really interesting post this past weekend on Slate, entitled “What If There Were Rules for Science Journalism?”  The author, Fiona Fox, chief executive of the Science Media Centre in Great Britain, has identified a major problem in public health: how to adequately and adequately express the complexity of findings from public health science to the public? The post frames the issue around those public misunderstandings that may actually be fueled by journalistic practices: the desire to focus on the most sensational aspects of a story, the notion that panic or controversy ‘sells,’ the tendency to overstate the importance of a single study in the search for ‘breakthroughs,’ and the like.  One paragraph that was particularly striking:

Ruth Macklin, Ph.D.
Professor of Bioethics, Department of Epidemiology & Population Health 
Today is World AIDS Day — a reminder that 2.7 million people have become newly infected with HIV each year for the last five years. UNAIDS—the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS—reports that at the end of 2010, 34 million people in the world were living with HIV.  (For other current statistics, see http://www.unaids.org/en/.)

Cheryl Merzel, DrPH, M.P.H.
Associate Professor, Director of Public Health Educational Programs, Center for Public Health Sciences.
Why does public health seem to be so ineffective in communicating prevention and health promotion messages? This question was vigorously deliberated at a recent Master of Public Health faculty lunch.

The issue of PSA testing, which has always been a matter of some controversy, has been in the headlines recently, since the US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) issued an update of their recommendations, in draft form for public comment.  Here’s a video from the Republican debate, held shortly after those draft recommendations were released: