Twenty years after the Windhoek Declaration on press freedom

and AIDS in any given society —
such as unequal power relationships
between men and women.
Bringing <strong>the</strong>se issues to <strong>the</strong> surface
is challenging: newsrooms are
<strong>the</strong>mselves rarely bastions of gender
equality. But progress is being
made in all <strong>the</strong>se areas and, partly
as a result of intensive interventions
and media training, HIV reporting
has made great quality strides in recent
<strong>years</strong>.
Health journalists in Africa also
need to navigate difficult ethical
and professional issues, particularly
in terms of <strong>the</strong> rise of <strong>the</strong> ‘evidencebased
medicine’ movement.
How should journalists engage with
this global movement, that is based
on assumptions that ‘good science’
can be trusted to provide <strong>the</strong> best
evidence of how diseases work, and
what treatments are effective? The
idea that medical science is unbiased
is long discredited, but sifting
through <strong>the</strong> hundreds of thousands
of journal articles produced each
year, and working out what <strong>the</strong>
‘best’ new evidence is, takes patience
and training and tenacity.
These insights have to be juggled
with indigenous knowledge, and
often with audiences’ reliance on
health practioners who don’t operate
in evidence-based paradigms, such
as homeopaths (more Germans
go to homeopaths than to GPs for
routine health problems, just as in
many Africa countries, traditional
healers are often front-line choices
for ailments).
Journalist don’t want to be insensitive
to cultural contexts, but all
<strong>the</strong> evidence indicates, for example,
that homeopathic and o<strong>the</strong>r nonscientific
medicine has no impact
on AIDS and most serious ailments.
Not being straight about this truth
is irresponsible. Too many people
get ill and die because <strong>the</strong>y rely on
treatments that are unscientific,
whe<strong>the</strong>r <strong>the</strong>se are hawked by big
multinationals, or local ‘healers’.
These challenges are core to <strong>the</strong> educational
task that faces African media
and African journalism schools.
Health journalists are not only
about being translators of complex
science, and educators about health.
They are also in <strong>the</strong> business of
explaining public policy and health
systems.
“Health journalists
in Africa also
need to navigate
difficult ethical and
professional issues,
particularly in
terms of <strong>the</strong> rise of
<strong>the</strong> ‘evidence-based
medicine’ movement.”
Getting all this right is very difficult.
Initiatives such as specialised training
courses offered by media and
health promotion NGOs have made
some impact. And <strong>the</strong> new honours
degree in Health Journalism at
South Africa’s Rhodes University is
part of <strong>the</strong> greater specialisation
that health journalism in many
African countries needs a lot more
of.
Section 4: Access to Information
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