New Interactive Tobacco Map

I just got an e-mail from RWJ about this today, and I thought it was quite excellent - a new interactive tobacco map that shows a nationwide picture of tobacco policies in the U.S. It lets you see how things evolve over time, check out state policies and tax rates, etc.

The map is available here.

This is just a great example of health communication that can help the average public (in addition to researchers and policymakers) see the big picture about what's going on with a particular topic (in this case tobacco control policy) around the country. Very nicely done.

My Home in an Advertising Department

I have to say there are plenty of times that I'm exceptionally happy that I work and teach in an advertising department. I enjoy the classes I teach, and the students are creative. Hard to complain, really.

But a couple days ago I was even more appreciative of my advertising home, as I watched some undergraduate students tackle a photo shoot for a new hand washing campaign we're developing. The basic idea for the campaign grew out of a class project a few semesters ago, and this semester I was able to build a team of graduate and undergraduate students to develop the new campaign. The undergraduates are the copywriters and art directors, and on Monday we tackled a photo shoot in a local coffee shop to give them the images they're going to need to create the campaign.

I'm pretty Photoshop-impaired, so I'm always impressed that starting with a pile of raw images they're able to come up with great looking ads - the final product is always impressive. I'll post more about this once we have some of the rough ads in place, but for now I just wanted to express my general satisfaction working in an advertising department - the students bring such a fresh perspective to health promotion, it makes for exciting and productive research.

This American Life: 81 Words

I'm going to be making a presentation tomorrow on message design for low health literate audiences, so I've been a bit busy this week...

So just to get something up here, I'd like to recommend that everyone go listen to This American Life from this past weekend: 81 Words. It's an old (2002) episode that looks into history behind the APA's decision in 1973 that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness. It's a GREAT episode, and it was new to me.

Health Literacy Issues Among Women with Visual Impairments

There are few blog posts I enjoy as much as sharing a fresh publication, really. So here's a new article out in Research in Gerontological Nursing, with Tracie Harrison from the UT School of Nursing as the first author. The abstract is:

The purpose of this secondary analysis using qualitative description was to explore health literacy using the health care experiences of women with permanent visual impairments (VIs). Interviews were analyzed from a sample of 15 community-dwelling women ages 44 to 79 with permanent VIs who had participated in a larger grounded theory study. The 15 women were interviewed twice; the audio-recorded interviews were then transcribed verbatim and analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Using the Institute of Medicine’s definition of health literacy, the women’s experiences were categorized into their ability to obtain, process, and understand health information. Their perceptions of the factors that influenced their health literacy were also explored. The women voiced that barriers to their ability to gain information in a format amenable to their processing skills, combined with barriers arising from health care providers’ attitudes, undermined their ability to build health literacy capacity.

The full article is available on the journal website here.

County-by-County Public Health

I'm sure this is going to be one of the big health items in the next news cycles, but it's also going to be really handy for health communication researchers looking to justify using a sample drawn from particular counties. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation just has a write-up of the research, conducted by folks at UW-Madison, looking at public health on a county-by-county basis around the U.S.

The actual website where you can dig into the data is available at County Health Rankings. It's a very well done website, which lets you dig down into every state to get some good stats on each. There are other reports that let you sort counties based on health outcomes and health factors, get more extensive reports on each state, etc. Really, really good stuff.

Travis County, #7 in Texas, there we go!

Vaccine Follow-Up, Mental Health

Sometimes I have the feeling that the good people of On the Media are producing that program just for me... Last week's episode served as more evidence of that, given their coverage of the retraction of the vaccine-autism article from The Lancet. OTM brought on the editor of The Lancet to discuss how the whole affair will change how the journal deals with the media and the scientific community. It's an interesting segment: A Shot of Reality.

It seems like the buzz about this retraction died out very quickly, which is a little disappointing. Like I said previously, it's hard to imagine the retraction really having much of an impact on people who strongly believe that vaccines have a link to autism, having this retraction out there in the mainstream media a bit more might have helped reach those people that don't have any opinion yet.

This past week OTM took a look at the proposed revisions to the DSM, which was one of the bigger health topics this week. OTM's take, The Art of Diagnosis, featured some interesting history of various conditions in the media - neat stuff which I certainly had never heard before. NPR Talk of the Nation (here) and On Point with Tom Ashbrook (here) also touched on the DSM changes and other mental health issues in the last week.

My work hasn't really focused on mental health, but one of the more interesting components of a health communication class I taught a few semesters ago was related to mental health. I think it's a fascinating area of work, I keep wondering why I haven't dug into it more directly yet... Perhaps in my next round of projects.

Finally, I wanted to point readers to Roxanne Parrot's blog: Talking About Health - Why Health Communication Matters. Roxanne's work is well-known to anyone working in health communication, and her blog will be a good way to keep up on what she's thinking right now. Definitely go check it out.

National Conference on Health Com, Marketing, and Media

Helping spread the word on this...

Save the Date: Fourth National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing, and Media

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is pleased to announce the fourth annual National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing, and Media to be held August 17 - 19, 2010, at the Omni Hotel in Atlanta, GA. This conference brings together individuals representing academia, public health researchers and practitioners from federal and state government and the private sector, and provides a forum for collegial dialogue within and across these disciplines. The conference is an excellent opportunity to meet with colleagues and shape the future of health communication, marketing, and media practice.

Abstract submissions for the 2010 Conference on Health Communication, Marketing and Media will be open in early March 2010. More information regarding the conference will be sent as it becomes available. Please sign up on the conference webpage (http://www.cdc.gov/healthmarketing/NCHCMM2009/) to ensure that you receive those email updates.

Journal Retracts 1998 Paper Linking Autism to Vaccines: Who Cares?

From The New York Times: Journal Retracts 1998 Paper Linking Autism to Vaccines

The article discusses some of the background on the original research led by Andrew Wakefield that was published in The Lancet, additional research efforts to confirm a potential link between the MMR vaccine and autism, and potential ethical concerns with the original research.

I found this particular sequence in the article to be particularly interesting:

Jim Moody, a director of SafeMinds, a parents’ group that advances the notion the vaccines cause autism, said the retraction would strengthen Dr. Wakefield’s credibility with many parents.

“Attacking scientists and attacking doctors is dangerous,” he said. “This is about suppressing research, and it will fuel the controversy by bringing it all up again.

I was talking about this in the office a couple days ago, and the conversation was about whether or not this retraction will matter. My initial reaction is that it won't - the people who believe there is a link between the MMR vaccine and autism aren't likely to be swayed by the retraction of this article. Indeed, it may strengthen their conviction that the government/academia/big pharma are trying to bury the truth.

This article reminds me of a NPR Science Friday that was on probably a couple months ago. They had a vaccine expert on talking about this, and a parent called in who believed there was a MMR vaccine-autism link. The vaccine expert explained his view of the science and facts. The parent said he wasn't right. At some point (because he's a good host) Ira Flatow asked the caller if there was anything the vaccine expert could say that would change her mind. The caller thought for a moment, then replied (IMHO) honestly: "Probably not."

I don't know that this is something I'm going to dig into myself, but there's an interesting study here - particularly if you have pre-data on people's opinions of the MMR vaccine-autism link or we can assume that plenty of people never heard about the retraction (probably a safe bet) to do a pre/post survey to see what impact it has on people's opinions.

Hand Wash Ad

This semester I'm going to be working on a campaign to promote hand washing, and one of the students working on this project found this ad in a magazine. I went online and found it via Google (how I love Google's image search...), and I wanted to share here because it's fantastic.

We're still playing with different ideas and exactly how we're going to execute the campaign, but the whole "remind people how gross it is not to wash their hands" was one clear strategy that a LOT of students generated during the course of a class project a couple years ago I did related to hand washing. I thought this ad, for Lifebuoy hand wash, was one of the more clever executions I've seen on that idea. I'm very curious how effective the ad actually is, but it certainly scores high on the creativity scale.

NCA 2010 - Call for Papers, Health Communication Division

Helping spread the news, like a good NCA Health Comm member...


Submission Deadline: February 17th, 2010 (9 PM EST)
Planner Contact: Kami J. Silk, Michigan State University, silkk@msu.edu

The Health Communication Division of the National Communication Association invites submissions of completed papers, paper sessions, and panel discussions that focus on theory, research, and/or practice of health communication. We especially welcome submissions that address the conference theme of “Building Bridges, which includes subthemes particularly relevant to health communication: 1) linking our scholarship with professions beyond our discipline; 2) bridging areas of scholarship and teaching; 3) connecting our research and pedagogy to community projects; and 4) maximizing benefits and overcoming difficulties of new technologies that connect people. All submissions will be submitted to competitive, blind review. Submissions are due no later than February 17th (9 PM EST), and can be submitted via All Academic which can be accessed at www.natcom.org.

Paper Submission Requirements

• All identifying author information (names, institutions, hidden document properties) should be removed from papers (not panel proposals) before submitting.

• Papers must conform to APA 5th Edition guidelines.

• All submissions must be made electronically through the All Academic system as Word, Word Perfect, RTF or PDF files.

• Papers should be no longer than 25 pages and use a 12-point font size. (Abstract, References, Tables and Figures are not included in the 25 page limit).

• Specify if you are a student author.

• Specify if you would like your paper to be considered for the Scholar-to-Scholar program.
PLEASE NOTE: PAPERS THAT DO NOT MEET APA GUIDELINES, DO NOT STAY WITHIN THE LENGTH AND FONT SIZE LIMITS, OR HAVE NOT HAD IDENTIFYING INFORMATION REMOVED WILL NOT BE REVIEWED.

Paper Session and Panel Discussion Submission Requirements

The Health Communication Division welcomes submissions of full program panels. These can either take the form of a paper session with several related presentations, discussion panel of scholars and/or practitioners, or some other original format. Panel submissions should include the names and affiliations of presenters. Please use the following guidelines for panel submissions:

• All submissions should be made electronically through the All Academic system as Word, Word Perfect, RTF or PDF files.

• Panel submissions should include a Title, an abstract (maximum 75 words), and a rationale for the panel (250 words maximum). For paper sessions, All Academic will allow you to add the name of each panel member and a document associated with that panel member. These documents should be an abstract of each participant's presentation (maximum 250 words) if this is a traditional panel. For panel discussions, feel free to upload a document giving more detail about the panel and participants.