The Union Minister for Health & Family Welfare, Dr. Anbumani Ramadoss while inaugurating the first National Health Writers & Communicators Convention organised by the Health Essayists and Authors League (HEAL), highlighted the role of media in creating health awareness among people.
Addressing at the convention he cited the present public health in India especially rural areas as a massive challenge and lack of knowledge, illiteracy further acts as a great barrier towards health care promotion, therefore called for a massive sustained awareness campaign.
The ministers encouraged the health journalists, writers and communicators for their continuous effort in this regard and also asked them to be well prepared and equipped themselves in launching awareness among people with dissemination of knowledge and information.
“With our teeming population coupled with inadequate infrastructure, public health is a massive challenge for our country. Majority of our population is in the grip of one or the other scourge – nutritional deficiency, infectious diseases, water-borne and vector-borne diseases, etc. This problem is compounded by low level of literacy in general and lack of health awareness in particular”, Ramadoss added.
As journalists, writers play a major role in the awareness battle; their effort can further facilitate Government’s various new initiatives in terms of combining educational activities with policy interventions.
Dr. Ramadoss too asked media to be more cautious and vigilant while reporting many health related stories especially based on western research. He said that some of the reports tend to give wrong message to the readers by wrong interpretation and hence should be guarded against such tendency.
The Health Minister also talked about the laudable effort of the government in providing health care facility to its entire people through several existing and new national health programmes such as the National Rural Health mission (NRHM), National Urban Health Mission (NUHM), National Organ Transplant Programme, Oral Health, Prevention and Control of Fluorosis and a number of programmes on non-communicable diseases, especially Cardiovascular Diseases (CVD’s), Diabetes Mellitus, Cancer, Stroke and Chronic Lung Diseases etc. besides, media and government together can play a bigger role in addressing issues of maternal mortality, infant mortality, declining sex ratio and under-nourishment at large.
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