CSU 45/2010: DIGGING UP THE LITERATURE FROM YOUR COUNTRY/ SOAP OPERAS AND MESSAGES FOR HEALTH

Sunday, 18th of April 2010

CSU 45/2010: DIGGING UP THE LITERATURE FROM YOUR COUNTRY/

SOAP OPERAS AND MESSAGES FOR HEALTH

1) DIGGING UP THE LITERATURE FROM YOUR COUNTRY

Since many of you do not see your countries appear very often in these updates, let me suggest to you one way to find child health articles of greatest interest to you:

PUBMED

1) go to www.pubmed.gov

2) in the search engine, type in, for example, 'Zambia AND child health' or 'Bangladesh AND child health'

3) click to make sure that the results appear in chronological order, the most recent appearing first.

If you are from a small country with few citations you can, for example, type in 'Africa AND child health.'

If you wish only to view items with free full text (no more than 20 percent of the total), click on the right under 'Filter results.' Otherwise, you get all articles, most of them with abstracts only.

JOURNAL PAGES

If there are individual journals of great interest to you, go to their homepages and ask to be put on the mailing list for their etoc, electronic table of contents. The ones I find most useful are the WHO Bulletin, www.who.int/bulletin/en/, the Public Library of Science/Medicine at

http://www.plosmedicine.org/home.action, Emerging Infectious Diseases at http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/index.htm, and the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, www.cdc.gov/mmwr The Lancet and the British Medical Journal both have homepages, but some articles are pay per view. This is also true for most articles in the American Journal of Epidemiology, the International Journal of Epidemiology, and the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Health.

Writers from South Asia should consider the Indian Journal of Pediatrics at http://indianpediatrics.net/ and the Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition, from ICDDR/B, at http://www.icddrb.org/publication.cfm?classificationID=30

2) SOAP OPERAS AND MESSAGES FOR HEALTH

A look through the NLM database shows that the present century has produced only 13 papers on soap operas in the published medical literature. One of the more interesting, summarized below, shows an association between soap opera viewing and condom use.

Has there been any effort to promote child survival interventions in soap opera? Are the practitioners of commercial TV and public health on the same wavelength, or on different planets?

Good reading.