We will be visiting the Centre for Health Protection on Tuesday, and a bus will pick us up from the Meng Wah complex car park and bring us back to Hong Kong U. The bus will leave at 1.45 p.m so please be there ahead of time.
The Centre for Health Protection comes under the Department of Health and was set up after SARS, with a mission to monitor and respond to diseases. Read more about it here http://www.chp.gov.hk/en/index.html before the trip.
Welcome back on Tuesday. I hope you have spent reading week doing some reading! As I had mentioned in our last class, we will have a guest speaker, Ee Lyn Tan of Reuters speaking to us about her work as a regional health correspondent; Go the Reuters website and search for some of her stories, and be prepared to have a discussion with her about her work etc.
The second half of the class will be a discussion on the recent controversy over the research into the H5N1 virus which we talked about in our last class. Controversies such as this are complex, because there is often no right and wrong, and the role of journalists is to help the public understand the science, and the reasoning behind different opinions. I have uploaded five stories on our website here http://jmsc.hku.hk/courses/jmsc6090spring2012/readings-on-h5n1-controversy-for-class-discussion/. Please read them carefully, note the different arguments, and be prepared to explain in class what the different issues are. We will divide into groups and have a discussion on how best this story should be reported.
We will postpone our discussion on TB till the following week.
Many of you are still probably confused after our discussions of p values and confidence intervals yesterday, so I am enclosing a pamphlet which explains this pretty simply. The simplest possible way to describe the two is that the p value tells you the likelihood of an experimental result occurring just by chance ( as in the coin flipping in class, when we got three or four heads consecutively). A p of less than .05, shows that there is a less than 5 percent probability that a particular result occurred by chance. This p value is considered a minimum level for studies.
Confidence intervals tell you the range within which the true value can be found . For example, a result such as 31 ( 25-40) 95% CI, means that the study came up with the figure 31, the true value is between 25 and 40. Why is there such an range of values? Because each experiment or set of observations is from a particular sample ( ie 6,500 people in the case of the pravastatin case we discussed yesterday), and samples can vary. The CI tells us if we keep doing the same experiment with different samples, 95% of the time we will get a value between 25 and 40.
Still confused? Then just remember to look for P<0.5 in the results of a paper, and also look at the range for the 95% CI so you know the range within which the true value lies.
Don’t forget to finish the HIV/AIDS online course before next class, so we can have a good discussion.
Thanks for a good discussion on penicillin, antibiotic resistance etc yesterday and see you on Tuesday.
Story from the Guardian updating the mortality from malaria worldwide
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/03/malaria-deaths-research
I could not finish everything I wanted to yesterday, so this is a follow up e mail. I found a New York Times story on the Oral HPV study that we looked at in class last night. It is by far the best of the news reports, and I have annotated it for you with my comments. This is a good way to learn how to write health stories ( or any stories for that matter): by analyzing and pulling apart good stories, and seeing why they work.
Next week we will go over what we discussed on the different kinds of studies,and then try and write a story in class based on a journal article. Don’t worry, this is not graded. Please bring laptops (if you do not have your own pls check one out from the DM lab).
I had also did not have time to talk about assignment deadlines. These deadlines are set so that you would have finished most of your assignments by the end of March, and won’t have to compete with other class deadlines. Here they are:
l Feb 28: First Story
l March 15: Book Review
l March 28: Second Story
l April 17: Third Story
Online courses to be completed by
l Feb 21 HIV/AIDS
l Feb 28: Malaria
l March 13: TB
I will explain in detail what I want from each of these assignments. In the meanwhile, please get one of the review books from the library and start reading; If you can’t get the book you want, let me know. Also, keep up with the readings on The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine. We will have a discussion session on it.
The lecture powerpoint is on the course web site.
Thanks for a lively first class! I have uploaded the power point from the lecture, as well as the course syllabus. Please buy or borrow the The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, and read the Introduction and the chapters on penicillin and cortisone. Also, bring your lap tops to our next class ( and every class). We will do an online game to learn about public health. Also, go to the library and look at the books I have suggested for review, and pick one. I will talk about the deadlines for assignments, as well as the book review in our next class.
Till then, enjoy your new year break, and all the best for the Year of the Dragon!
Welcome to the course website for JMSC 6090 Reporting Health and Medicine. You will find course material including the course outline, lecture power points as well as updates about classes.