Telling New Stories in HIV Prevention

Telling New Stories in HIV Prevention

This is a curriculum to guide CASPR science media café conveners on building the capacity of team members. There are five main sections, presented as lessons:

1. What’s Hot (for example, the #EchoTrial)
2. The Science (consists of readings and lesson plans/exercises)
3. The Story (theory and reading about journalism best practices and exercises)
4. Science Media Cafes. Organize it! (Closed access internal guidance about café and grant management)
5. Resources (mainly links, PDF’s and references to sites, science, HIV and journalism related) e.g. WFSJ, AVAC, IAVI, etc.)

TOP TIP: look out for documents marked WS (for Worksheet), which are lesson plans to guide conversations and learning about the new stories in HIV Prevention Science.

The Why and How To of the new stories of HIV Prevention

This guide is designed to help journalists tell the “new” stories of HIV prevention: An impressive number of clinical trials are underway or are soon to be launched in the quest for an HIV vaccine and for other effective ways to prevent HIV infection through biomedical intervention.

This guide is intended to help three types of professionals work more closely:

• Scientists working in HIV biomedical prevention;
• Advocates working in HIV prevention;
• Journalists writing about HIV

Telling New Stories in HIV Prevention is a guide to help journalists to work with advocates and scientists to break down the science so that their readers are informed, engaged and interested in finding out more about new ways to prevent HIV.

Why?

Since the start of the epidemic, an estimated 78 million people have become infected with HIV and 35 million people have died of AIDS-related illnesses.  In 2016, one million people died of AIDS-related illnesses. In 2017, about 40 million people are living with HIV globally, but almost a third of these people don’t know they are HIV positive. In 2016, there were roughly 1.8 million new HIV infections. (UNAIDS Fact Sheet 2017).

How?

Upon completion of this guide you should feel more comfortable in these areas:

• Knowing science and the processes of science;
• Getting to know more about public health;
• Knowing the HI virus inside out;
• Exploring the latest science;
• Doing robust journalism;
• Networking and collaborating.

Journalist teams in the Coalition to Accelerate and Support  Prevention Research (CASPR) (NE) programme hold  science media cafés to unpack HIV research and development issues in countries where a high number of biomedical  prevention trials are taking place.

This guide is a tool to build science lessons into media science cafés.