Flu vaccine's disease?

I found today a blog named Americablog, thanks to blogrunner, where the blogger discussed about the New York Times' article about the pseudo-reaction on the flu vaccine. I agree with his idea about the fact that this impression of augmentation of seizure, heart attacks.... is purely psychological. There are a lot of seizure and heart attacks every day and the injections give an explanation, a cause for these tragical events. I liked his comparison, that he explained with a very common case. A man is walking down the street and you sneeze. Right after that 2 cars crash in front of you. "Just because you sneezed and then two cars crashed doesn't mean you SNEEZE caused the car crash.". This is a very simple exemple but that clarify everything.

A study give hope in the fight against AIDS

According to the New York Times and CNN, a study started in 2006 in Thailand and using 16,402 volunteers, showed that a vaccine had a significant result. Apparently, half of the volunteers received a combination of 6 vaccines over 6 months and the other half received placebos. They were all followed during 3 years and the trials showed that the vaccined ones were 31 percents less likely to get infected by the HIV than the placebos receivers. The Vaccine is now known as RV 144. This is a big step in the research against this virus that kills millions of people each year. Colonel Jerome Kim told CNN that "before this study, it was thought vaccine for HIV is not possible" as a reaction on these hopeful results. Moreover, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the trial's bakers added to The New York Times that "there's [not] any doubt that this is a very important result". "For more than 20 years now, vaccine trials have essentially been failures".

An AIDS Vaccine Conference will take place in Paris, France next month, where researchers will expose the details of their initial findings.

We also know that this study was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the U.S Army Medical Research and Material Command.

Health day by day

Let's change of support and talk about something else than the swine flu. The federal health officials apparently prohibited the sale of cigarettes with flavors in, because of the attraction that these perfumes do on teenagers and young adults. A commissioner of food and drugs, Dr Margaret A. Hamburg, said that " These flavored cigarettes are a gateway for many children and young adults to become regular smokers". Studies also show that every day, about 1,100 children and teenager become daily smokers. These are part of the 3,600 that start to smoke each day. We also learn that one of the more famous flavored cigarettes introduction make was Camel Exotic Bends by J.R Reynolds with different flavors such as Warm Winter Toffee or Twista Lime.

Why Health?

I choose the health topic because right now, the flu ( H1N1 ) is still threatening a great part of the population. I wanted to know about the actual medical progress on this subject. I first search on cnn.com where I found that the vaccin's trials were good on children between 10 and 17 but needed a review for younger people.

Then I searched on the New York Times . There was an article about new drugs coming soon, but maybe not soon enough to attack vthe flu in time. The H1N1 flu is, according to the article, already resistant to 2 other older drugs, and in rare tests, it was resistant to one younger drug, Tamiflu. In the same time, researchers say that they need to find new drugs because if the resistance on Tamiflu still go on, there would be only one drug effective, Relenza, a cure that you will be inhaling rather than inhaling, which is kind of unconvenient.

Is a blog helpful?

A blog is really a kind of help to learn journalism, you can find yourself in the same position than a reporter, you write an article for people who are going to read it online. Like a journalist, you have to think about how make your article interesting so many people will read it. Moreover, it establish a connection between writting ( what the blogger publish on his blog ), and reading an thinking ( what the reader will say in his comment, he will try to be pertinent ). You can also introduce some news to people without rewriting the original article. Your text may be long or short, it is succesful if the reader will see the source to learn the actual facts, for example, my first entries subject is on nytimes.com .

What do I know now?

The most important thing I've learned so far is that you can't right an article , news or not, by putting words together without thinking about the whole story you are going to tell...
You have to imagine how to make it interesting for the type of readers that are reading you, you have to anticipate their interests, and that will affect a lot your kind of writing (vocabulary, phrase' construction)!! It is a big work of reflexion..
The news have to be understood, we have to read between the lines; when an article is written, it's precious to know how to analyze it.. ( timeliness...)
I hope that these aspects of journalism will be discovered more and more. We have to be prepared to know and learn about the world we live in, actuality, curremt events...

Some future alterations for the firefighters?

Original article by Ian Urbina for the New York Times from nytimes.com


This article shows us how firefighters from a Washington unit become the target of every medical emergency phone calls, even as much as fire emergency; those calls are about asthma, heart attack or even diabetic sores...

Timeliness isn't a very present element in this article, the ''when'' just tell us that non-fire emergency calls increased in a year but....
Proximity isn't the point too. Washington isn't that close to us.

However, Prominence, Consequence and Human Interest are there:
the event deals with firefighters, people who are charged to protect and react against in case of fire. We can easily imagine that this situation could lead us to a possible modification of the exact conditions of this profession. Then we can see the Human Interest:
people who wish they could go to the hospital but can't, often because of money, can see here an open in the system and could benefit of it.
But this is just an idea..

Even if it is good for people, firefighter aren't that glad, Mr Muyleart said to the New York Times that ''[he] joined the force to battle blazes, not to be an emergency room doctor''.

It is, in fact, really interesting, because people do care about how and by who they are going to be treated in case of accident.