Getting AIDS science right
This week, I sat in a workshop on reporting the science of HIV/AIDS, hosted by the Media, AIDS and Governance Project at IDASA and the Treatment Action Campaign. Clearly it’s a complex subject and the workshop raised myriad challenges that need to be addressed.
Aside from having to understand the science themselves (which is no easy task, we aren’t scientists after all), journalists have to break these concepts down into simple, clear terms and communicate them in these terms to audiences. This is an ongoing process – the science evolves – and the whole of it cannot be learnt and understood in one day. We certainly covered the most essential basics and were very fortunate to have some very engaging clinicians (Diana Hardy from the Department of Virology at UCT and Linda-Gail Bekker from Desmond Tutu HIV Centre at the Institute for Infectious Diseases and Molecular Medicine) talking us through the basic science, while peppering the information with new developments and current challenges.
Knowing the science and having the ability to communicate it simply and clearly becomes that much more important in a climate in which we need to counteract the confusing, misleading and just plain unscientific, messages on HIV/AIDS that currently plague our understanding of the virus, which permeates from certain sectors of both government and civil society. But, as I said, it’s difficult.
This difficulty is exemplified by a practical session facilitated by Nathan Geffen from TAC on how to read and interpret an abstract on the research findings from a clinical trial (in this case on the efficacy of ARVs to sustain changes in mortality and morbidity rates), and then report on these findings journalistically. The findings are dense to read and contain references to statistics that don’t make any sense without the right tools with which to read them. But we used the session to break the abstract down into bite-sized chunks and explain the key concepts, and after understanding it from this perspective, it didn’t seem all that intimidating after all. But I wondered, besides the 15 or so journos sitting in that room, who else has been equipped with these kinds of essential skills? And a number of the participants raised the issue of time: that journalists simply don’t have the time to go trawling the contents pages of journals available on the web, decide what is important or new and then sit down and write a meaningful report on the findings.
The newsroom is already an under-resourced and pressurised place, and health reporters have to face a barrage of difficulties – getting their HIV/AIDS stories published and having to write a host of stories every day on different health issues, not just HIV/AIDS. And so on and so on. Who’s got time to spend on getting the science right? We all agree that it is the responsibility of journalists to report accurately, but maybe they just don’t have the time to do it as thoroughly as it demands. This concern led the participants to a discussion on to what extent civil society and research institutions can facilitate the process of reporting the science and make it easier for journalists to access and interpret the information. We talked about sending out weekly email alerts that highlight new and relevant research or interesting studies on which there should be reporting. On this side we could add a fact sheet to JournAIDS that gives guidelines on reporting science and tools that are necessary to do so accurately and meaningfully.
The thing is, though, at the end of the day all of this is useless if we don’t have journalists who are passionate about HIV/AIDS reporting and who are committed to reporting the science, as well as the human interest and the hard news. Time is always going to be a challenge and something we’re just going to have to overcome. There are already reporters who are committed to telling this story to its fullest, at whatever cost. An experienced and well-respected health journalist made a similar point at the end of the session – we can provide the alerts, the tools, as much support as we can, but if we don’t have the passion and commitment from media, then we are powerless, really. Civil society and research institutions can’t tell the story.
There are no easy answers. The one thing I do know, plagiarising from the best, is that history will judge us. So whatever it takes, we should get off our arses, stop muttering about time and resources and all the other thousands of things to complain about, and do something about it. Even if that means spending more time and getting the science right.