A comparative analysis of how the media in the United Kingdom and India represented the emergence of NDM-1.

Research papers on New Delhi metallo-β-lactamase (NDM-1) provoked considerable but very different media coverage in the United Kingdom (UK) and India. We describe how the media represented this research using qualitative thematic analysis of contemporary coverage by daily newspapers in the UK and India. Fifty-four UK and 187 Indian articles mentioned NDM-1, describing it as the 'new super superbug' resistant to most antibiotics.

Public engagement with emerging infectious disease: the case of MRSA in Britain.

As a route to providing a framework for elucidating the content of public thinking concerning emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases (EID), this article examines public engagement with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). It explores how British lay publics represent MRSA utilising a social representations framework. For this group, MRSA is associated primarily with dirty National Health Service (NHS) hospitals that have been neglected due to management culture having superseded the matron culture that dominated the putative golden age of the NHS.

Explicitly linking teaching and assessment of communication skills.

Background: Communication skills teaching is known to be effective, but students feel there are discrepancies between how communication skills are taught and how they are assessed.

Aims: This study examined the effect of using standard assessment criteria during communication skills teaching on students' performance in an end-of-year summative OSCE.

Method: Students attending their year 3 communication skills teaching were randomised to one of the following three conditions: the assessment criteria were available for reference on the medical school website; or students received the assessment criteria for use in the discussion and feedback; or each student's performance was graded by him- or her-self, his or her peers, the tutor and the actor using the standard assessment criteria.

The "hospital superbug": social representations of MRSA.

The so-called 'hospital superbug' methcillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) became a topic of media and political concern in Britain from the middle of the 1990s. It was increasingly politicised in the period leading up to the British General Election of 2005. This study examines the meanings of MRSA that circulate in Britain by analysing newspaper coverage of the disease over the 10-year period 1995-2005.

Representations of mad cow disease.

This paper examines the reporting of the story of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and its human derivative variant Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease (vCJD) in the British newspapers. Three 'snapshots' of newspaper coverage are sampled and analysed between the period 1986 and 1996 focusing on how representations of the disease evolved over the 10-year period. Social representations theory is used to elucidate how this new disease threat was conceptualised in the newspaper reporting and how it was explained to the UK public.

Representations of SARS in the British newspapers.

In the Spring of 2003, there was a huge interest in the global news media following the emergence of a new infectious disease: severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). This study examines how this novel disease threat was depicted in the UK newspapers, using social representations theory and in particular existing work on social representations of HIV/AIDS and Ebola to analyse the meanings of the epidemic. It investigates the way that SARS was presented as a dangerous threat to the UK public, whilst almost immediately the threat was said to be 'contained' using the mechanism of 'othering': SARS was said to be unlikely to personally affect the UK reader because the Chinese were so different to 'us'; so 'other'.

Professional networking using computer-mediated communication.

Traditionally, professionals have networked with others in their field through attending conferences, professional organizations, direct mailing, and via the workplace. Recently, there have been new possibilities to network with other professionals using the internet. This article looks at the possibilities that the internet offers for professional networking, particularly e-mailing lists, newsgroups and membership databases, and compares them against more traditional methods of professional networking.