Covering Violence & Global Health

by Emily Kim

     One panel at the global health conference was challenged to help journalists find global stories in their Pacific Northwest communities. The speakers were ready. 

     Amy Hagopian, a professor in the UW School of Public Health and Community Medicine, talked about displaced populations around Washington such as Tent City and the local heroes that work in the global health field. She spoke of a student of hers who received a National Science Foundation grant to study nomadic people forced to settle and how she will study them through their drinking water.

     “It’s a great little story that nobody will ever cover,” Hagopian said.

     Hagopian said that a great way to find stories on immigrants was to look in the public schools since you don’t need to be a citizen to enroll. The principal at Garfield High School, she said, made an effort to know the immigrant population and when he learned of those who had nowhere to go home to, invited them to his house for Thanksgiving dinner. Go to Emily Kim’s page.

by Elizabeth Sharpe

      A thick iron-barred cage can keep divers in the open sea protected from great white sharks.  But a single barrier is too simple a solution for people who fight deadlier water-related predators–bacteria, viruses, and parasites–in the poorest regions of the world, argued panelists at a global health conference for journalists May 2-3 in Seattle.

     The panelists agreed that Americans tend to be attracted to a single approach or a quick fix, such as a vaccine for malaria, with the hope that this will solve the problem.  Only no one single technology can be a panacea for malaria, nor for water-borne illnesses, said panelist Marla Smith-Nilson, executive director of Water 1^st. Go to Elizabeth Sharpe’s page.

by Kevin Grimes

During a panel titled “Climate change: How could it complicate global health efforts and planning” at Friday’s Covering Global Health conference, the only thing that was certain was uncertainty.

The panel, led by Jonathan Mayer, UW professor of epidemiology and geography, global health, and medicine; Christine Bachman: UW global health education and curriculum program assistant, and Nancy Lewis, director of the research program at the East-West Center in Honolulu, discussed the potential impacts that high temperatures, rising sea levels, extreme weather changes, and fossil fuel shortage could have on a wide variety of global health issues.

Frustrating all of the journalists in the room however, was the panelists’ lack of definitive answers.  “What I want to argue is that there is more uncertainty in the relationship between climate change and health than is actually known,” said Mayer. Go to Kevin Grimes’ page.

by Molly Talbert

Representatives from the Seattle-based non-profit PATH (Program for Appropriate Technology and Health) and the pharmaceutical giant Merck presented a united front, extolling the benefits of corporate-philanthropic alliances despite dissenting opinions among journalists and others at the Covering Global Health Conference in Seattle May 2-3. Go to Molly Talbert’s page.

by Camden Swita

In a stuffy room at the University of Washington, journalists, health officials, and students were urged to consider the elephant in the corner of many news rooms: How should issues outside of the U.S. be covered to resonate with an American audience?

            International reporting might seem like a mainstay of journalism, something inevitable and vital. But with the Fourth Estate in a decline and bunkering into the safe zone of local coverage—the belief that readers are only interested in issues they can trace to their personal lives pervading—the importance of reporting on issues outside of the U.S. is being re-evaluated by many editors. Is it still practical? Is it still necessary?

            “The story here is that it is frustrating times; it’s hard to do global health stories right now,” David Kohn, a medicine and health reporter for The Baltimore Sun, said. “But it’s doable; you just have to make sacrifices. There are places who want them and ways to do them.”  Go to Camden Swita’s page.

by Brad Zimmerman

      An impending influenza pandemic, bird flu in school children, and animals harboring infectious diseases were topics caught in the net of an “emerging diseases” panel at Friday’s conference uniting global health professionals and journalists.

     Keynote speaker Joe Cerrell, director of global health policy and advocacy for The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, opened the conference by saying, “The greatest challenge of our lifetime is to destroy the disease that kill around the world.”

     The world of emerging diseases is very tricky in this respect, as being prepared for the most unexpected of events is the name of the game.  Go to Brad Zimmerman’s page.

by Philip Pirwitz

     Agendas of global health should be established by leaders local to the area in need, agreed three panelists at the University of Washington’s first – and possibly annual - global health conference held last Friday and Saturday at the South Campus Center. 

     “We have a problem with fashionable diseases,” said Stephen Gloyd, Associate Chair of Global Health and professor of Health Service at UW, speaking Friday primarily about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, known for their contributions to the specific fight against HIV/AIDS and malaria in Africa.  “They address one disease [for the ill in Africa] to be killed by another.”

     Much of the problem stems from the lack of understanding foreign donors have about what type of aid is needed – not just vaccinations, but workforce, transportation, education, and basic necessities like food.  Go to Philip Pirwitz’s page.

by Philip Pirwitz

     While great success has been made in global health within the last decade, journalists have struggled to find the stories that truly connect with local readers, Joe Cerrell, director of global health policy and advocacy for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said last Friday to kick off the first “Covering Global Health” conference at the University of Washington.

     “While [the Foundation] cannot pay the media to write stories, we can make stories more media ready,” said Cerrell who introduced many of the programs the Foundation had started to orient reporters and editors to the health work being done in developing nations.  “We have nothing to do with the content [of the story],” said Cerrell, “and don’t even always agree with the story,” but “we still push the envelope to get stories out there.”  He also reported on the Foundation’s efforts to support journalism from developing countries.

    Cerrell suggested that to adequately tell those under-represented stories of progress, journalists “create a public and political will to solve problems” of poverty and “promote policies and systems that encourage potential solutions.”  These stories, he said, should be written from a bottom-up perspective, focusing not only on the work done by non-government organizations but by successes made on an individual and grassroots level.