New Communicable Diseases: A Communication Challenge

With the advent of modern communication technologies in recent decades, words and images, transmitted by mass media, are helping to shape habits and lifestyles that affect health. This essay argues that many of the lifestyle diseases are therefore communicable via information media. The AIDS pandemic has focused attention on the role of communication, both interpersonal and mediated, in educating the public on health. The time has come for health professionals and communication specialists to address four issues: recognition of these diseases as new communicable diseases, greater research on the specific effect mass media have on public health, the partner relationship between media and health professionals, and training in communication for health personnel. The future of public health, especially in the area of combating the growing lifestyle diseases, as we enter the 21st century, depends to some extent on what steps are taken now.