CDC's 2009 HIV Prevention Conference: “Innovation and Action to End the Epidemic”

By Michele Clark

The 2009 National HIV Prevention Conference is reaching over 3,500 of our colleagues in Atlanta this week. Thanks to conference organizers, this year’s highlights are shared to those unable to attend via Twitter: CDC NPIN , AIDS.gov , and others are tweeting with the hashtag #NHPC09 . CDC also provides conference participants with text message updates , and videotaped many of the presentations to broaden reach (CDC NPIN should have these posted around September 7th).

Miguel Gomez, AIDS.gov Director, presents at NHPC09

This morning, AIDS.gov Director Miguel Gomez presented on the plenary panel, “Advances in HIV Prevention Science and Technology.” The AIDS.gov presentation focused on how the HIV community can adopt new media tools to further their work. Miguel said, “we have a responsibility to learn about new media—to learn what clients are doing online, what new media is, and how to fit it into our overall HIV prevention planning.”

Podcast Promotion Tips from Apple

Admiral Joxel Garcia, Assistant Secretary for Health

Pete Alcorn, Podcast Manager at iTunes. Photo courtesy of Personal Life Media on Flickr

Last week, Miguel Gomez, Director of AIDS.gov, sat down with Admiral Joxel Garcia, the U.S. Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to record a podcast about health and the Latino community in the U.S. As we mentioned in a past blog post, and in our “New Media Toolkit,” podcasts can be a simple way to gather and provide audio and/or video information to your target audience. But once you have created them, how can you help people find and subscribe to your podcasts?

To help us answer this question, we turned to Pete Alcorn, Manager of Podcasts at Apple’s iTunes, the largest podcast directory and the most common venue for people to subscribe to podcasts (Note: there are many other directories, including Zune, Odeo, and Podcast Alley ). Miguel and our colleague Fred Smith from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention met Pete at the New Media Expo in Las Vegas last summer.

Reaching Latinos with New Media for National Latino AIDS Awareness Day

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Tomorrow is National Latino AIDS Awareness Day (NLAAD). According to a recently released CDC fact sheet, Latinos represent only 15% of the total U.S. population, but make up 18% of new HIV infections. Among Latinos, men make up the vast majority of new HIV infections (76%), but Latino women are also at disproportionate risk for HIV. They are infected with HIV at a rate four times greater than white women.

In recognition of this important day, we’re continuing our conversation from last week by highlighting additional examples of using new media tools to reach the Latino community with HIV information.

The Health Blogosphere

Mike Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services

As the summer comes to an end, we want to share information about an event which took place this summer and reinforced the importance of using new media tools in public health. In July, the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) sponsored a webcast, “The Health Blogosphere: What It Means for Policy Debates and Journalism ”. Secretary Michael Leavitt from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the author of Secretary Mike Leavitt’s Blog, gave the keynote address.

Share, Listen, and Learn

Last week, the New Media Expo took place in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Expo brought together 2,000 attendees, including individual media makers, companies, schools, and organizations wanting to learn how to create audio and video content that will educate, inform, and inspire their audiences. The AIDS.gov team was there to learn, listen, and share our own stories.