USA Today

This news piece explores the history of, and communication strategies informing, the collaboration between entertainment industries and public health organisations seeking to stem the spread of HIV/AIDS.

With a specific focus on the American - "Hollywood" - context, the article begins by describing "a broad shift in the way health experts convey information to the American public on a range of diseases, particularly AIDS. They no longer rely solely on preachy public service ads popping up at odd hours on television and on billboards: 'This is your brain on drugs.' Today, health messages are routinely 'embedded' into story lines of TV's most popular entertainment shows..." For the past several years, on TV shows such as MTV's Smart Sex and the NBC hospital drama ER, Hollywood writers and producers have been weaving "compelling emotional stories" about individuals dealing with HIV/AIDS into their storylines. The Norman Lear Center for Hollywood, Health & Society initiative, which is carried out by the University of Southern California with funding from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), has been one partnership effort supporting such a public health communication strategy.

According to the article, media participation in HIV/AIDS prevention is expanding around the world. Global collaborations among government, public health organisations, and media companies are using the entertainment industry - radio, TV, the internet, texting, and mobile TV - the latter of which, according to vice chairman of MTV Networks and chairman of the Global Media AIDS Initiative, "in certain parts of the world...is racing". This Initiative was created by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) in 2005. At the 16th International Conference on AIDS in Toronto, Canada, a cluster of major media partnerships were showcased, involving some of the biggest entertainment companies in the USA, the Caribbean, Africa, India, Russia and Ukraine. Kaiser and MTV used the "theatrical backdrop of the AIDS meeting itself" to launch a competition called "fortyeightfest" through which 8 teams of young filmmakers were given 2 days to write, edit and produce short AIDS-awareness films to be viewed and judged during the conference. MTV planned to film a documentary about the contest and broadcast it with a celebrity host. Soap operas in developing countries have also been a popular means of "showing the human face of AIDS", according to one expert quoted here.

The entertainment-education strategy detailed in this article is based on findings from the KFF and other organisations, such as that the media have repeatedly been named the number 1 source of medical information in the United States and around the world, especially for young people. And, according to a 1997 KFF study, one ER scene on the sexually transmitted human papilloma virus (HPV) boosted awareness about the virus among the show's millions of regular viewers from 24% to 47%.