In the course of this early education, she decided that she wanted to improve China’s healthcare system. Still, she didn’t necessarily want to become a medical professional. Eventually, she chose health reporting as the means she would use to both practice her passion and improve people’s understanding of health care. “I’m open minded and always very active. I love to communicate with people,” said Hu, who was interviewed in the IWMF offices before starting her 2005 IWMF Public Health Fellowship at the The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Hu said she decided to become a journalist while in high school. Now the health desk editor at the Shanghai Star, an English-language weekly, and a public health reporter for China Daily, Hu reports on everything from HIV/AIDS to Avian flu to cancer. During her IWMF fellowship, she will focus on raising awareness about HIV/AIDS through a series of stories about the disease in China’s southern Guizhou Province.
She admits that her lack of formal medical training has been an obstacle in her career. Learning how to report on health – a very specialized area – has, she said, created some “very hard homework,” she said. “My first teacher is my mom.”
After joining the Shanghai Star in 2000, Hu gradually developed sources among medical professors and doctors in China. In addition, in her spare time she reads medical books and journals. “It’s one by one, step by step work,” she said.
It also helps that most health reporters in China are women, she said. Business and political reporting are dominated by men, but for health reporters, “it’s a woman’s world,” she said. This is evident at both of Hu’s publications. She is one of three women reporters on the health desk of the Shanghai Star. At the China Daily, three women and one man work on the health desk.
Hu says she feels that her stories have been able to make a difference on public health in China. In particular, she points to her coverage of antibiotics abuse, which along with reporting by other Chinese journalists, forced the national government to draft regulations that put controls on the sale of antibiotics. Now, in all of China’s major cities pharmacies are no longer allowed to sell antibiotics without a prescription.
Hu’s former editor at the Shanghai Star, Chen Wiehua, believes that Hu’s coverage of a government’s decision to run tobacco ads during the 2004 Formula One Grand Prix led to the ban on tobacco ads during the event. Hu’s story on the genetic tests developed to treat Mad Cow disease won the China Daily Best Reporting Award in 2001.
Hu believes that HIV/AIDS is the most important issue on her beat. “China missed the chance to control the disease ten years ago,” she said. “Now the HIV virus has spread … to the general public.” She said that most media in China have neglected the pandemic, preferring instead to cover the disease only on World AIDS Day, December 1. “The topic is quite sensitive and it’s very hard to do such kinds of reports,” she said.
The AIDS pandemic is particularly precarious in South China’s Guizhou Province, where there is high drug use, she said. “If we don’t take action right now, it may be out of control within ten years.” She said that there could be as many as one million unreported HIV carriers in China, but that the general public has not realized the gravity of the situation. She added that there is still an incredible stigma attached to HIV/AIDS victims and their families. “To interview AIDS patients, in the opinion of some journalists, is risky,” she said.
Hu said she does not share that fear. She said that she hopes the IWMF’s Public Health Fellowship will help her to improve awareness of the disease. Specifically, she wants to find out more about how the U.S. media played a role in improving public awareness of HIV/AIDS. She is also looking forward to broadening her contact with leading U.S. scientists and doctors in order to “find out how they engage in research and treatment, [and] how they help with patients.”
After four months at The Inquirer, Hu will return to China, where she will spend an additional two months working on her project. She said that she is looking forward to sharing her ideas and research with other Chinese health reporters and, most of all, to sharing what she has learned about HIV/AIDS. “With [this] program I can help make public how serious the situation is and further improve public awareness and call for more support from all around the world,” she said. “And not just from government but from individuals - especially those in China.”
August 2005