Abstract
The health scenario in India would have been dubbed the disease scenario had it not been for some pioneering efforts from across different sectors: government, multilateral agencies, NGOs, doctors and some remarkable individuals. It is one of the ironies of the communication domain in the country that although there are a large number of health communicators, the domain (or discipline) of health communication itself hasn’t struck root. So when Shubhra Gaur, the editor, asked me to edit a special issue of JOCC, I accepted the responsibility hoping to document the efforts of some of the pioneering institutions and individuals.
Sangeeta Shrivastava (Using Campaigns to De-stigmatize Leprosy in India: Stories from the Field) was associated with leprosy communication in Madhya Pradesh for over a decade. She worked closely with danida/danlep in de-stigmatizing leprosy. Her major achievement was in closing down a leprosy asylum, of which she has written a brief case in MICA Communications Review, the precursor to this journal. Danlep’s leprosy eradication campaign was perhaps the first large-scale, sustained and social action-based communication campaign in India that figured out that even with the advent of sure-cure, leprosy wouldn’t go away without confronting its stigma head-on. The result was a series of inexpensive, practical and quite revolutionary innovations: Trialogue, the 21-day mixed-group residential camps, hydro-oleo-physio-exercise (HOPE). Sangeeta’s article documents many of the important features of the decade-long campaign in two Indian states: Madhya Pradesh and Chhatisgarh. Since then, leprosy has been ‘eradicated’ from India.
If health communicators were asked to list topics their domain covers, it is quite likely that nutrition wouldn’t appear high on the list. The topic is so niche that it hardly gets discussed or written about; actually, unlike family planning that could unhinge from its traditional demography moorings, nutrition has yet to break away from specialized institutions. This is surprising because one out of two children in the country is malnourished. Subba Rao and Vinod Pavarala (Communicating Nutrition in Community Settings) attempt to put the issue of nutrition communication/education on the research agenda. They compare and contrast three approaches to nutrition communication and identify strength and limitation of each approach.
The last two articles take a different tack. They deal with how media cover health. Rahul Gadekar and others (Framing of the H1N1 Flu in an Indian Newspaper) analyze the coverage of H1N1 scare in the largest circulated English daily, The Times of India. Their article doesn’t talk about it, but it is revealing that what was an all-consuming rage for some weeks in late 2009, has all but disappeared from amidst us. That raises a fundamental question: Do media merely report panic and fear or is it the act of reporting that fuels it? H1N1 deaths were a fact, but reporting each death in Gujarat for the first few weeks was fictionalizing news.
Finally, Suruchi Sood, Corinne Shefner-Rogers, Joanna Skinner (Health Communication Campaigns in Developing Countries) examine key elements of health communication campaigns in developing countries. They review published literature on health communication over a 10-year period. Their paper raises important questions for health communication practitioners and scholars. How effective are health communication theories and strategies in a developing country context when such theories are developed elsewhere? In an important way, the article extends the argument that Subba Rao and Vinod Pavarala raise in their paper. The latter recommend contextualizing a health communication approach. Sood and others also underline the complexity of health situation in developing countries. That leaves us with a lingering theoretical question: Do health communication theories meet the relevance criteria? Are they comprehensive and generalizable enough to guide practitioners and policymakers? To what extent the current theories encompass different contexts? The ‘richness’ of theories is part of a larger paradigmatic debate in communication and it is hoped that health communication scholars will join it in greater numbers.