by Maria Ahmed
The Daily Mail has long been the scourge of social care professionals for its often controversial stories on all things concerning the sector. Now the paper's methods are laid bare a new book on how journalism really works.
To give you a taste, author Nick Davies, an award-winning journalist, tells how the Mail ran a story in July 2003 that began: "Asylum-seekers infected with the Aids virus are putting public health at risk, MPs will warn today. A growing number of asylum-seekers and migrants to the UK are infected with Aids or the HIV virus, says a parliamentary report."
Davies writes: "I went back to the parliamentary report on which this story was based, to check what it said. The report, by the all-party parliamentary group on Aids, turned out to be a detailed argument that precisely contradicted the Mail line. The MPs noted that, among the heterosexual population, 90 per cent of new cases of Aids had been contracted in sub-Saharan Africa. But it went out of its way to explain that this was not a problem caused by asylum-seekers."
Davies' book "Flat Earth News: An Award-Winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media", is published by Chatto & Windus on 7 February, but you can read a brilliant extract in the New Statesman today.
I can't wait to read it.
As usual you have look a bit beyond The Daily Mail, and near enough any newspaper to get at the real data.
What really started the debate was the "Eurosurvelliance" Report (January 2006) from G. Elam of the Health Protection Agency Centre for Infections, which stated;
"The annual number of infections newly diagnosed in heterosexual men and women born in sub-Sahara Africa remains high at 3,136 in 2004. There has also been a slow but steady rise in the number of heterosexual infections probably aquired in the UK in recent years, from 227 in 2000 to 498 in 2004. Most of these individuals were probably infected by partners who were themselves presumed to have been infected ourside Europe, mainly in Africa. As the number of black and minority ethnic heteosexuals living with HIV (diagnosed and undiagnosed) in the UK grows, the liklihood of heteosexual transmission within the UK will increase"
http://www.eurosurveillance.org/ew/2006/060126.asp#5
Now we course debate whether such data, true or not, should be released at all - but unfortunately the censoring of such data, though likely to be exploited wrongly by the likes of the Daily Mail, does get used to ensure sufficient resources are in place to address the HIV/AIDS crisis amongst sub-Saharan Africans in the UK. What the Eurosurveillance report doesn't detail is whether those infected/undiagnosed are asylum seekers or otherwise - that simply isn't a concern for a simple medical/demographic study.