A Failed Opportunity
In this field there is a constant struggle to find platforms from which to spread our messages. These messages are sometimes of awareness, sometimes of acceptance, and sometimes of debunking myth; and almost always a combination of these and many other things. We often have to concentrate weeks or months of effort on a single day to reach out, such as the recent 20 May event. Sometimes we reach 10 people, sometimes we reach 1,000.
I wonder what the daily circulation of the Indian Express is? Undoubtedly this newspaper reaches more people directly in a single day than we can hope to reach via many of our outreach activities. The news and information about the world is presented in black and white on your doorstep every morning. What an opportunity.
The title of this blog however is, A FAILED OPPORTUNITY. Newspapers like the Indian Express have a duty to not only tell the news, but to inform their readers.
At our press conferences we always hand our press information kids and give them resources to better inform their writing about HIV and AIDS. It is dreadfully clear however that these sheets are often discarded before an article is penned.
The article on June 5, 2007 regarding HIV infection in migrant labourers in Bilur is not the first time that The Indian Express has been complicet (perhaps unknowingly so) in perpetuating misinformation and distorted views regarding the virus. Going through the article word by word I can see so many opportunities for the author to help us, and help Pune by reaching all the readers and correcting misconceptions.
In the first paragraph an interview with an infected man quotes him as saying, "I don't think I will live more than two years. I was not aware that I would get disease after having sex with prostitutes. But now it is too late" At this point the author misses the opportunity to do a great service to their readership by informing them that the infected man may likely live for much longer than two years if newly infected man keeps to proper nutrition or gets access to ART treatment (also a good point to point out that this is theoretically provided by the government although despite the 5.7 Million people living with HIV in India, the government only targeted 100,000 to receive free ART and only 18,000 of those people actually received their drugs). So perhaps if this system got smoothed out, people like this migrant labourer in Bilur could live with the virus as a chronic condition as many do in the west. He also states that he didn't realize that he would get the disease after having sex with a prostitute. Firstly, it isn't a disease...it is a virus. Secondly, you don't automatically get it from having sex with a prostitute, nor can you only get it from having sex with a prostitute. With any sex, the key word is unprotected. The notion that having protected sex with a prostitute will prevent HIV transmission might be seen as promoting behavior that is not in accord with Indian morality or something and it is unlikely that Indian Express would publish such a truthful statement. If your wife is HIV positive and you have unprotected sex with her, you have a better chance of getting the virus than having protected sex with a prostitute whose status you do not know. However, this should not endorse any form of high risk behavior, but rather it would be a good time to either promote condom use or debunk some of the stereotypes that are continuously propagated to the detriment of workers like us who try to keep stigma from furthering the spread of the virus.
The article also commonly uses the term HIV/AIDS. We have stopped using this within our organization because of the connotation that they are the same thing. They are NOT. HIV is a virus that attacks your immune system, yet which can be fought for many years with the right combination of nutrition and ART, AIDS is a condition resulting from unchecked HIV driving your immune system into the ground so that you are susceptible to AIDS defining illnesses or opportunistic infections that can kill you. You DO NOT die of HIV, you do however die of AIDS related illnesses. They are different and you can be a very healthy PLHIV without being intrisically progressed through sematics to having AIDS, which is fatal.
In another paragraph it talks about a marriage being cancelled because of a positive HIV test. This bit of reporting could have been dovetailed with information on how to deal with HIV within marriage through safe sex and HIV in pregnancy through an ART regimen.
Later in the article, after again calling HIV a disease rather than a virus, it quotes a politician as saying that having more than 1 percent of his constituency infected is a "cause for concern". This should certainly say that if this one village politician is concerned by 1 percent than all of Maharashtra and all of India should be concerned because the country looms near that mark while areas of Maharashtra double it.
The article does mention that cultural and language barriers hinder access to medical assistance and treatment, but overall the article is severely lacking in doing justice to the news item.
I often think that news in general exists on the misery of the world, so perhaps it is that in doing something to allay this misery, the news corporations believe that they are taking away future business from themselves. Why else would they not use this opportunity to educate further on the issues that they raise. The article focuses only on a gloomy situation and indeeds tries to cast it in even a deeper pall than is necessary rather than using the platform to educate.
I wonder what the daily circulation of the Indian Express is? Undoubtedly this newspaper reaches more people directly in a single day than we can hope to reach via many of our outreach activities. The news and information about the world is presented in black and white on your doorstep every morning. What an opportunity.
The title of this blog however is, A FAILED OPPORTUNITY. Newspapers like the Indian Express have a duty to not only tell the news, but to inform their readers.
At our press conferences we always hand our press information kids and give them resources to better inform their writing about HIV and AIDS. It is dreadfully clear however that these sheets are often discarded before an article is penned.
The article on June 5, 2007 regarding HIV infection in migrant labourers in Bilur is not the first time that The Indian Express has been complicet (perhaps unknowingly so) in perpetuating misinformation and distorted views regarding the virus. Going through the article word by word I can see so many opportunities for the author to help us, and help Pune by reaching all the readers and correcting misconceptions.
In the first paragraph an interview with an infected man quotes him as saying, "I don't think I will live more than two years. I was not aware that I would get disease after having sex with prostitutes. But now it is too late" At this point the author misses the opportunity to do a great service to their readership by informing them that the infected man may likely live for much longer than two years if newly infected man keeps to proper nutrition or gets access to ART treatment (also a good point to point out that this is theoretically provided by the government although despite the 5.7 Million people living with HIV in India, the government only targeted 100,000 to receive free ART and only 18,000 of those people actually received their drugs). So perhaps if this system got smoothed out, people like this migrant labourer in Bilur could live with the virus as a chronic condition as many do in the west. He also states that he didn't realize that he would get the disease after having sex with a prostitute. Firstly, it isn't a disease...it is a virus. Secondly, you don't automatically get it from having sex with a prostitute, nor can you only get it from having sex with a prostitute. With any sex, the key word is unprotected. The notion that having protected sex with a prostitute will prevent HIV transmission might be seen as promoting behavior that is not in accord with Indian morality or something and it is unlikely that Indian Express would publish such a truthful statement. If your wife is HIV positive and you have unprotected sex with her, you have a better chance of getting the virus than having protected sex with a prostitute whose status you do not know. However, this should not endorse any form of high risk behavior, but rather it would be a good time to either promote condom use or debunk some of the stereotypes that are continuously propagated to the detriment of workers like us who try to keep stigma from furthering the spread of the virus.
The article also commonly uses the term HIV/AIDS. We have stopped using this within our organization because of the connotation that they are the same thing. They are NOT. HIV is a virus that attacks your immune system, yet which can be fought for many years with the right combination of nutrition and ART, AIDS is a condition resulting from unchecked HIV driving your immune system into the ground so that you are susceptible to AIDS defining illnesses or opportunistic infections that can kill you. You DO NOT die of HIV, you do however die of AIDS related illnesses. They are different and you can be a very healthy PLHIV without being intrisically progressed through sematics to having AIDS, which is fatal.
In another paragraph it talks about a marriage being cancelled because of a positive HIV test. This bit of reporting could have been dovetailed with information on how to deal with HIV within marriage through safe sex and HIV in pregnancy through an ART regimen.
Later in the article, after again calling HIV a disease rather than a virus, it quotes a politician as saying that having more than 1 percent of his constituency infected is a "cause for concern". This should certainly say that if this one village politician is concerned by 1 percent than all of Maharashtra and all of India should be concerned because the country looms near that mark while areas of Maharashtra double it.
The article does mention that cultural and language barriers hinder access to medical assistance and treatment, but overall the article is severely lacking in doing justice to the news item.
I often think that news in general exists on the misery of the world, so perhaps it is that in doing something to allay this misery, the news corporations believe that they are taking away future business from themselves. Why else would they not use this opportunity to educate further on the issues that they raise. The article focuses only on a gloomy situation and indeeds tries to cast it in even a deeper pall than is necessary rather than using the platform to educate.
posted by Deep Griha at 10:28 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home