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| R, Denise. "twitter-logo-1". 10/31/12 via Flicker. Attribution 2.0 Generic License. |
- What's happening on Twitter these days pertaining to Public Health?
Well, after stalking the APHA (American Public Health Association) for far too long, I learned so much about what was happening not only in the United States, but all over the world in the field of public health. I read multiple articles about new scientific discoveries and different outbreaks of diseases around the world. There were posts on new breast feeding tactics, the Zika outbreak, and different health care options. I found a multitude of article topics. There were maybe only two posts pertaining to the same topic. I was also scrolling through the 6,585 people that the APHA account was following and I found some other incredible resources. The followers included multiple state health departments, passionate moms and doctors wanting to comment on their views of public health, as well as a plethora of different colleges and their specific public health department of that school.
What I also found were tweets from people talking about how public health affected their daily lives. There was a tweet from a transgender who was happy that public health saved her $40 a month on hormones. Hillary Clinton's twitter also posted articles on the Zika birth defect disease. There were all different types of things that people were tweeting about that I never realized were that prevalent in every day lives.
Some of the major topics that are discussed on Twitter deal with controversial health care plans or just new controversies that have been updated dealing with medicinal issues around the world. I have learned more about new discoveries around the world in the time that I spent looking through Twitter posts than I have over the last few months just by checking Yahoo! News every so often. It really is incredible how fast news travels when so many people who care about a topic come together and discuss it.
- 2 Interesting Stories I Found on Twitter
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| TipsTimesAdmin. "1. pregnancy". 12/25/13 via Flicker. Creative Commons Generic License. |
I found this article extremely interesting especially since I spent the majority of last semester in my Nutrition class learning about the importance of folic acid in the diets of pregnant women. But if I am going to be completely honest, the main reason I find articles on pregnancy intriguing is because all I want in life is to be a mom.
After working at a daycare for the past 2 and a half years, I have become obsessed with children (in a non creepy way) and so I love learning new ways to have healthy children and have their life start well even while they are in the womb. So, with this article, I once again learned about the importance of folic acid for the baby while they are growing inside the mother. Folic acid decreases the possibilities of your child having spina bifida (a spinal cord defect where there is a "hole" in the backbone where the spinal cord never finishes developing). Since spina bifida is not curable, it is extremely important that your baby doesn't develop this birth defect.
I really enjoyed finding more information about this specific birth defect and I liked to know that a lot of people talk about folic acid on twitter daily.
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| Jordan, Doug. "A nurse giving a woman a flu vaccine shot". Via FreeStock Photos. Public Domain License. |
This article on nurses not following standard procedure immediately caught my attention. For as long as I can remember I wanted to be a nurse (however over the past year I changed my mind). But when I saw that nurses were becoming sloppy with the handling of viruses, I was taken aback. I had always looked up to nurses for always knowing what to do and handling situations with care and easy. After reading this article though, I realized that the nurses throughout the U.S. were caring less and less about their own health as well as the health of others in the contamination department. According to the article, less than 1 in 5 nurses did all of the 9 procedures that are necessary to avoid disease transactions. It is really interesting to me to find out all of the secrets of being a real-life nurse and not just the nurse that I had always dreamed up in my head.
Learning information that is vital to everyday life apparently can so easily be found on social media sites like Twitter.
- My Currently Updated Thoughts on Twitter Regarding Public Health
Going on Twitter again and seeing the thousands of tweets involved with Public Health really solidified why I was so interested in majoring in it in the first place. I can now clearly see how important public health is to lives all around the world.
The people that were posting about Public Health came from all different backgrounds which was a bit surprising. There were mothers, doctors, state governments, politicians, college professors, nonprofit health agencies, and hundreds of health foundations all over the country. I expected doctors and health related companies to be tweeting about certain health issues or new discoveries, but I never thought that famous people (without a scientific background) or even just regular people like mothers and grandmothers and dad would be interested in this too.
Public health doesn't just have to deal with health care plans like I had once thought. Instead, I can work to inform others of new scientific findings that can better lives, or inspire others to promote healthy living and get vaccinated. I really found myself appreciating the field of Public Health much more after going through the Twitter feed and reading all of the different posts about it. I may even consider recreating my Twitter just so I can follow the APHA account and learn legitimately valuable things instead of what Becky wore to school yesterday.
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