AIDS made headlines around the world when it first surfaced in the 1980s. Since then, as happened with Tuberculosis (TB) decades earlier, interest has waned.
Today, a cure for AIDS would make front page news… but, as Chinese journalists participating in a Thomson Reuters workshop in March discovered, AIDS or Tuberculosis is not just a health story.
« Some of my friends are living with HIV, some are not. What about it? We are all friends united against HIV! »
Those words, from China's basketball star Yao Ming in November 2009, turned AIDS into a sports personality story for a day. His comments were part of a global campaign designed to raise awareness of the risks surrounding the disease.
But AIDS is also a business story, a science story, a showbiz story, a political story… The list is endless. The same is true for TB, a disease which has been with us since antiquity and is back in a more deadly drug-resistant form.
AIDS, which destroys the body’s natural defences against disease, and TB, which eats away at the lungs, are two of the biggest killers of our age. One person is infected with the bacilli (bacteria) that cause TB every 20 seconds – most likely by a sneeze. TB is a major killer of people with AIDS.
Personal stories
The participants, working journalists from a range of Chinese media and two graduate students, spent a week at Beijing’s Tsinghua University learning about the two diseases from medical experts and listening to the stories of those living with the HIV virus, those at risk of infection and those working with them.
They heard about governments plans from the spokesman of China’s health ministry and they wrote stories, compiled personal fact boxes on the science of the subject and participated in a daily knowledge quiz. They visited China’s most popular gay bar and a Non Governmental Organisation working with and counseling patients at an AIDS unit at a Beijing hospital.
The March 15-19 workshop, funded by pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, combined journalistic skills training and ethnics with the acquisition of specialist knowledge. Participants wrote stories based on what speakers and other sources told them and used their journalistic skills to gather scientific, technical & medical knowledge from expert sources and incorporate it into personal Fact Boxes.
An investment banker told participants how he now devotes his life to helping AIDS orphans or children of HIV infected parents – a fascinating story that would mixes business and education.
Steve Dahllof, Asia Pacific head of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, explained how the world of advertising helped raise awareness and change behavior and attitudes to AIDS and heart disease among women in the United States – a business story, a life-style story and a people story, depending on how you choose to write it.
In China, this could become an interesting story if the party leadership buys into the argument that social marketing, as this segment of the industry is called, and prevention can save money in the long run. Depending on how the advertisers choose to run the campaign is could even become a showbiz or celebrity story.
A story of stigma
For countless individuals around the world, infection by the HI virus that causes AIDS or the bacilli (bacteria) that cause Tuberculosis is a scary life-changing experience.
For many, because of stigma and discrimination at home or at work, it is news they would rather not spread around. Others, apart from the physical symptoms, are unaware of what is happening to them.
But, for doctors working to control the disease, lack of awareness of the risks, and a feeling that “It couldn’t happen to me”, are a major factor in its spread.
In many countries, stigma and fear are still rife, particularly in poorer communities. Participants heard how Chinese farming villages with families infected with HIV via blood transfusions had problems selling their produce but fear and rejection are.
Doctor NweNwe Aye from UNAIDS told a story from Burma, her home country, about a girl who went to Thailand, kept her family with the proceeds of her work as a prostitute, went home with AIDS and died in squalor, alone and rejected by those she had helped over the years.
“Nobody wanted to touch her,” she said. “She died very soon in the midst of her excretia…. That is how people were isolated in the family.”
An economic story
TB, a disease commonly associated with poverty, is curable. AIDS is not. Antiretroviral drugs keep the HI virus at bay and allow the immune system, which it attacks, to regain some of its strength.
First-line TB drugs are cheap and effective, but a course of treatment lasts six to eight months. Patients, particularly in poor communities, sometimes cut short their treatment once they start to feel better or, in some cases, to save money. As a result, the bacilli, living organisms like us, get used to the treatment and learn how to defend themselves against it.
Treating AIDS and TB, particularly the drug-resistant form of the disease, comes with a cost and that’s where the fight to control the spread of the diseases becomes an economic or a political story.
The UN and campaigners fighting to curb the spread of the two diseases created World AIDS Day (December 1) and World TB Day (March 24) and recruited celebrity ambassadors to focus attention on the diseases and raise awareness of the risks. World AIDS Day is an opportunity to rally political support for the cause and, as Doctor NweNwe Aye from UNAIDS pointed out, China’s top political leaders regularly turn out on December 1 to shake the hands of people living with HIV.
Pictures of that on state TV and in state media send a strong message about stigma and discrimination but news, more than anything, involves new ideas or change and competing World Days have been with us for a while.
Story for a day
How many of you read a TB story on March 24? Can you remember what the story was? If someone standing next to you on the tube or a bus sneezes, do you even think about the risk of contracting TB?
With the drug resistant form of the disease hitting record levels perhaps it might be time to find out more about a disease that slipped from the headlines for so long than research into new drugs virtually ground to a halt.
That, and the cost of treating drug resistant forms of the disease, is not just a science or a health story, it is also a fascinating business or political story.
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