The INFO Project Blog

Recently I was introduced to a fabulous new tool designed to combat HIV/AIDS related stigma.  “Pos-or-not” sponsored by MTV Networks is a game of sorts that allows user to decide if a man or woman is HIV+ based solely upon his or her looks and a brief description of their personality.  The site was designed to show individuals that there is no way an someone can tell if an inidividual is HIV positive or not based upon their looks.  The site was based upon the “Hot or Not” site, where users decide if a picture of someone presented is hot or “not” (hot).

Child Lives: Stolen Lives, the NOW on PBS program that screened at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in January, has received the Edward R. Murrow Award for best TV interpretation or documentary on international affairs from the Overseas Press Club (OPC). 

At the panel discussion following the Hopkins screening, journalist Maria Hinojosa discussed the media’s role in exposing under-reported stories affecting women and girls around the world, like child marriage. She said,

The issue of child marriage gets glossed over… But this practice sets [girls] off for life impoverished, disempowered, and at risk for all these health issues.

Read more about the panel, organized with ICRW and featuring additional child marriage experts from Hopkins, the Population Council, and TOSTAN, at INFO’s press archive.

All the winners of the OPC’s Edward Murrow awards are listed on their site.

Listen to Maria Hinojosa speak with broadcast news reporter Marc Steiner about the serious health consequences of child marriage.

Several INFO staffers journeyed to Washington to attend the two-day FP forum, Strengthening Family Planning Services through Operations Research: Lessons Learned and Future Directions, in the Reagan Rotunda building. The sessions, sponsored by FRONTIERS and ACCESS-FP, were chock full of new ideas. What to do, what to do? For starters, we thought we’d rattle off a a few choice tidbits.

Five Pithy Quotes

1. “The theme of this meeting might be the blurring of family planning” –Ian Askew, on the growing emphasis on integrating services with HIV/AIDS voluntary counseling and testing as well as maternal and child health services.
2. “If you know a woman who got pregnant when she was not meaning to, raise your hand [most hands up]. That’s why we are here today” –Catharine McKaig, ACCESS-FP/JHPIEGO, about why postpartum family planning is so important.
3. “And we are all family planning wallahs here,” –M.E. Khan, Population Council, India, saying that even he is skeptical that family planning should always have a role in antenatal care services.
4. “It’s the year of living dangerously” — Holly Blanchard, ACCESS-FP/JHPIEGO, about the first postpartum year, when providers may not prescribe a hormonal method because bleeding has not resumed. During this year, the risk of pregnancy is very high.
5. “They say LAM is an old wives tale”–Marcos Arevalo, Population Council, Mexico, about policymakers’ reluctance to endorse and support breastfeeding as a modern family planning method.

Four Surprising Statistics (or, why operations research matters!)

1. 61% of HIV-positive adolescents used no contraceptive method during first sex (Harriet Birungi, Population Council, Kenya, during a presentation on the family planning needs of HIV-positive youth).
2. Every year in Africa, 250,000 women die every year in childbirth (Annie Mwangi, Population Council, Kenya, explaining midwives’ crucial role in expanding service delivery).
3. Cost of IUD insertion right after delivery is as low as $2.14 (John Pile, ACQUIRE/EngenderHealth, on long-acting and permanent contraceptive methods during postpartum period).
4. Women using LAM were 20 times less likely to be pregnant 1 year after another pregnancy than women who had not been using the lactational amenorrhea method, or exclusive breastfeeding to prevent pregnancy after birth to baby’s six month birthday (Marcos Arevalo, Institute for Reproductive Health, Georgetown University). Read the rest of this entry »

Stephanie Sinclair, one of global health’s most powerful lenswomen, has photographed children forced into marriage as young as eight. Her intimate portraits of girls in Nepal, Afghanistan and Ethiopia, first published in the the New York Times Magazine, have won accolades from UNICEF. Now, combined with priceless audio recordings of these girls’ stories, the images become yet more powerful in a The Bride Price: Consequences of Child Marriage Worldwide, a 6 minute video that you can watch on the International Center for Research on Women’s YouTube channel.

SING MUSIC VIDEO

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On World AIDS Day, December 1, 2007, a charity record titled “Sing” was released globally to raise money and awareness for the activist HIV/AIDS organization, Treatment Action Campaign (TAC). The organization campaigns for treatment for people with HIV and to reduce new HIV infections.

Singer Annie Lennox teamed up with 22 other female superstar singers to record a song that Lennox had written, “Sing.” Some of the other singers include Madonna, Celine Dion, Pink, Shakira, Dido, Faith Hill, Joss Stone, and Melissa Etheridge. The “Sing Campaign” also encourages people to get involved in the fight against HIV/AIDS by, for example, donating directly to TAC, organizing events to raise money for TAC, hosting the “Sing” banner on other Web sites, raising awareness about the Sing Campaign and HIV/AIDS by word-of-mouth, and educating children in schools about HIV/AIDS. Watch the “Sing” music video on “MySpaceTV Videos.”

As one of the authors of the recently published Population Reports issue on behavior change communication programs (“Communication for Better Health”), this campaign caught my eye for a number of different reasons. First and foremost, the campaign design of using popular music by well-known singers gives the campaign great potential for success. Read the rest of this entry »