Tropical diseases and journalists: are they getting acquainted?

Abstract

The IHMT’s Marketing and Communication Department aims at sharing with society the produced knowledge within the Institute’s intervention areas. Relationships with journalists play an important role in this knowledge transfer process, and they are maintained through a continuous contact with the media, whereas the Institute is often considered one of the most important and credible sources of information as a result of a permanent effort in raising awareness to global health and tropical medicine topics. To promote journalist’s production on these often overlooked subjects, IHMT has launched in 2014 a biannual Journalism Prize on Global Health and Tropical Medicine, to be handed out during the National Congress on Tropical Medicine. This edition’s Chapter on Communication includes the three prize-winners texts about the context or motivations that led them to publish the awarded articles on HIV, malaria and the Ebola virus. These also correspond to IHMT’s priority intervention and knowledge transfer areas. It is paramount for the Institute to keep raising journalists’ awareness for not overlooking the health problems that still afflict the most vulnerable populations, for it is necessary that journalism keeps preserving in its practices the values of humanity, equity and justice.