THE MEDIA AND PUBLIC HEALTH

The Media and Public Health



The Media and Public Health

Introduction

Modern public health is impossible without considering the role of the media. On the one hand, public health media used in some of its interventions, and secondly, the treatment that they give some news about health can influence population health and health care organization. Health crises, real or alleged, are an increasingly common scenario that faced by public health authorities.

Discussion

The mass media, mass penetration and its undeniable influence on the formation of behavior have become an important channel of information on health issues and they have understood the international organizations that govern health as the World Health Organization and its subsidiary Pan American Health, the latter at the 23rd Pan American Sanitary Conference in September 1990 took special interest in positional communication as an important discipline for basic training of people and communities and definitely no public health without participation of these corporate bodies, the promotion and disease prevention is only possible if we know that it is. In a survey conducted in the residential Orinoco from Puerto Ordaz, 64.82% did not know the risk factors for chronic diseases, a reflection on the work we perform a herculean task for which information without the intervention of the media not may be possible (Mason, Ferrell, 2007).

Communicate health should not be the sole responsibility of media owners and on how to fill space, or limited by institutional campaigns of health agencies, which certainly leaves much to be desired in content and quality of information, but must be an obligation of all who in any way we live in the health sector, without forgetting the famous phrase "long health has gone beyond the health sector" pronounced by experts at the conference in the Russian city of Alma Ata in 1978. And this responsibility cannot be limited to information that each of us can contribute, but we must become evaluators of health information for the message that comes through the media quality is really useful (Tomaselli, 1997).

In many cases the health message broadcast media does not seem able to produce no effect and in this sense studies have found that use of the language used is too technical a major barrier to communication and this is not the fault of the medium but many times those who intended to inform through them, hence the health information in the media must ...