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Posts tagged public health

22 March 2010
image An iconography of contagion
image
"Discover the Unknown Spreaders!," 28 x 39cm print, National Tuburculosis Association, United States, c.1940, from the exhibition An Iconography of Contagion, US National Library of Medicine, February 2010 :: via MetaFilter
The National Institutes of Health has an online exhibition of 20th century health posters from various countries, key-coded by different common visual motifs (hands, mouths, skulls, rodents, sinister blobs). Many of the posters present an odd mix of informativeness and fear-mongering; quite a few traffic in stereotypes of disease and contagion (and diseased/contagious people) that read uneasily in the present day. This anti-TB admonition is one of the cheerier examples.
re: disease, icons, posters, public health, stereotypes
Nate:
19 September 2008
excerpt Public service plotlines
Public health researchers worked with TV scriptwriters to see if viewers do, in fact, learn anything lasting about healthcare from watching Grey's Anatomy. A good portion of them do—good news for public health crusaders and advertisers alike.
re: advertising, changing the world, medicine, memory, public health
Nate:
from "Television as a Health Educator: A Case Study of Grey's Anatomy," by Victoria Rideout, Kaiser Family Foundation, September 2008 :: via Nudges

The proportion of viewers who were aware that, with the proper treatment, there is more than a 90% chance of an HIV-positive woman having a healthy baby increased by 46 percentage points after the episode aired (from 15% to 61%). This includes 17% of respondents in the post-show survey who volunteered the specific response that the woman has a 98% chance of having a healthy baby—the statistic that was repeated several times on the show.

Six weeks after the episode aired, the proportion who gave the correct response had dropped to 45%, but was still substantially higher (by 30 percentage points) than it had been prior to the show. This time around, however, only 3% volunteered the specific fact that the woman would have a 98% chance of having a healthy baby.