It’s Tuesday. The day after a Texas nurse is diagnosed with Ebola. The day before the news tells us that a second healthcare worker is likely infected. It’s a warm day and four gregarious HS seniors, young black women, indulge me as I interrupt their animated talk about some celebrity’s breakup. They’re on their way […]
Dr. Tom Frieden, Director, CDC (Sunday 10/13/14) At some point, there was a breach in protocol, and that breach in protocol resulted in this infection.” “The (Ebola treatment) protocols work. … But we know that even a single lapse or breach can result in infection.” Bandwagon Terms; Definition When experts introduce a technical / scientific […]
As Drew Altman declares in theWSJ this week, [there is] “A Perilous Gap in Health Insurance Literacy.” He’s referring to some of the sobering statistics from The Kaiser Family Foundation Survey of Non-Group Health Insurance released this past June – a treasure trove of information about who enrolled in private non-group health insurance in ACA […]
For those of us who burrow in similar holes trying to produce easier-to- understood language to explain health information, one place we find ourselves provincially tongue tied is when discussing any and all things scatological. excrement stool secretions solid bathroom waste bowels waste […]
I write a lot about the mounds of health information that fails to communicate clearly to the majority of the US public – not highly science and health literate and who labor to read well. When NYC City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito tweeted last night that she had been diagnosed with “high risk” HPV, I knew […]
Another Installment of Language Acting Badly Those of us who’ve signed up to receive text alerts from the impressive NYC system Notify NYC, know we open ourselves up to a wide range of warnings, notices, and concerning information that can intrude at any time day or night. (Let’s not go there)Some days a “Silver Alert” […]
I’d say the US broadcast media and online sources have shown restraint in the visual aids they’ve used covering Ebola this past week. Avoiding the horribly gory photos you can easily uncover on a Google search, in favor of health workers in HazMat suits and maps of the affected African regions. One visual that’s been […]
A friend from Down Under responded to my hand wringing about the unnecessary difficulty of the CDC’s explanation of Ebola on its website. She kindly shared an ABC News (AU) piece that does a far better job explaining some of the basic information about Ebola to the public. Above visual “Ebola Transmission Visual” The […]
More… Language Acting Badly Today, I’m taking top tier headline news about Ebola to see how easy or difficult it is for the public to find understandable information from trusted sources. Here’s a quick health literacy load analysis of the first 2 paragraphs of what the public encounters at the CDC website’s primary landing page […]
Each summer we hear the heartbreaking reports of young children dying as a result of being left in hot cars. Approximately 37 children die this way in the US every year – 1 every 10days. The media doesn’t shy away from alerting us, nor is there a shortage of public health messages from health and safety […]
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