Tag: Health

  • Reporting the Covid Pandemic from the Global South

    This piece in The Open Notebook delves into the experiences of “journalists in India and throughout the Global South” who were covering the Covid pandemic and the challenges they faced (and overcame) “as they sought to tailor coverage of a global pandemic to their unique, regional audiences.” 

    This is how the authors of the piece frame the commonalities in these experiences: 

    “There was the language issue, of course: The world’s 8 billion people speak over 7,000 languages, yet English is the lingua franca of science and scientific research, and many other languages lack even the terminology to convey science’s more complicated technical concepts. But newsrooms also had to bridge the social and cultural divides that often separate the science world from the communities they serve. Meanwhile, they were battling an infodemic of false and misleading claims, which spread across borders, continents, countries, and into even the most remote communities almost as quickly as the virus itself.”

    The authors spoke to journalists from India, Nigeria, China, Peru, Colombia, Philipines, and Kenya for the report. 

    Read the full article here.

  • The PPE Medpro Saga in the UK

    This report in the Byline Times summarises the PPE Medpro case. 

    The UK government had sued the company for £122m in 2022. But in the latest development: 

    “PPE Medro’s unaudited accounts, published last month for the year ended 31 March 2022, show just over £4m in current assets and just over £47,000 in cash. It reported no employees for the accounting period and none in 2021.”

    As the report points out: 

    “Byline Times was the first publication to reveal in September 2020 that PPE Medpro had won hundreds of millions in Government COVID contracts, just 44 days after being incorporated.” 

    During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company had “won two contracts worth more than £200 million to supply personal protective equipment (PPE)” including one contract “for £122 million worth of sterilised gowns to the NHS.” The government has since claimed that the supplied gowns “did not comply with the specification in the contract”. 

    The concern is that the company “won contracts through the so-called ‘VIP lane’ of suppliers” with the Conservative peer Michelle Mone being “accused of lobbying Michael Gove and Lord Agnew at the start of the pandemic in 2020 to secure business for PPE Medpro.” Mone “has denied having any relationship with the company” and “PPE Medpro claims it delivered the contract to its terms and supplied equipment “fully in accordance” with the contracts.” 

    It is important to note that: 

    “The Byline Times has previously been the subject of legal threats from PPE Medpro.”

    Read the full report here.

  • FAO Facilitates Japanese Aid to Boost Paddy Production in Sri Lanka

    According to this report, the Government of Japan, “through the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO),” is to provide $ 4.6 million “to strengthen the production capacity of smallholder paddy farmers in identified districts of the Dry and Intermediate Zones of Sri Lanka.” Reportedly, “[s]mallholder farmers are amongst the most vulnerable rural communities, predominantly cultivating rice for self-consumption.” 

    This comes in the wake of recent food shortages in Sri Lanka. According to the report: 

    “Together with its partners, FAO in Sri Lanka is addressing urgent food security needs, protecting the livelihoods of vulnerable farmers and fishers in the most affected districts while promoting agriculture, including in urban settings.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Adverse Effects of Microplastics on Human Hormones

    This report in Salon covers “a new study published by researchers at Rutgers University” about how “everyday plastic pollution could be endocrine-disrupting.” 

    As the report recounts, “[p]reviously, research suggested that chemical additives used to improve plastics, like bisphenol-A (or BPA), were potentially having all kinds of disruptive effects on human hormones.” But now the “new study suggests that even plastic without BPA can have comparable endocrine-disrupting effects.” 

    An important aspect of the methodology was that “the researchers found a way to successfully aerosolize the particles so they could see what happened to them when inhaled” since “this is a common method of absorption into the body.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Spate of Privacy Breaches by Healthcare Businesses

    According to this report, “Telehealth company Cerebral is facing a lawsuit that accuses the company of installing tracking technologies on its website and app that led to the protected health information of more than 3 million patients to be sent to social media companies.” 

    This is happening against the backdrop of “14 other hospitals and health systems around the country” facing lawsuits “alleging use of these tracking technologies on their websites.”

    Read the full report here.