[Music] I am talking now to Julia Belluz, a journalists from Vox, a news outlet available at www.vox.com. Julia, can you introduce yourself for our learners? Hi, I'm Julia and I'm the senior health correspondent at Vox, based in Washington, in the US. Do you think there's a lack of trust in science and health research today? I think that science is reaching this kind of reckoning moment where there is it seems like a lot of discussions happening about transparency and increasing the the reliability of research results I think science inherently is an iterative process and you know it's imperfect and it's obviously done by humans so it's going to be fallible but there are there are more and more efforts to try to strengthen science and and I think some of those could probably be interpreted as thinking maybe that, you know, that science is kind of at this moment, and researchers are at this moment of, in think, self-reflection. Does conflict of interests play a role in this situation? Yeah, I think that there's been a lot of awareness that industry-funded research is playing more and more of a role and supporting the science that's being done and people are questioning what, you know, what would impact that's having on the results of the research and the questions that are being asked. And we know from systematic reviews of all the research that studies that are supported by industry tend to have results that are favorable to the funders more often than independent studies on the same subjects, so yeah, that's something I think people are aware of and something that is playing into these discussions about how to strengthen science and where science goes wrong. Okay, in your opinion is it possible to every journalist to do a better job in reporting health news? I think yes, we could always do a better job and in reporting on research and health news and I think some of the ways we can do that are by being aware of the thing we're just talking about conflicts of interest so oftentimes when I'm looking at a new study that we want to report on I'll immediately look at who funded the study and it doesn't mean that it's a bad study but obviously bias can seep into research in all different kinds of ways and sometimes funders can bias the results of the study. So that that's one thing to keep in mind when you're reporting on health research that might make your research a little bit more nuanced. Other things are you know we tried at Vox to move away from reporting on single studies. So we've tried to think about how to report more on what's known in the body of research on a particular topic and where the consensus is and one thing that's really helpful for that is looking for systematic reviews and those are reviews that bring together the results of a lot of different studies, and you know weigh their relative strengths and then come to more fully supported conclusions and I think that's a really, they're often a very great resource for journalists and they help contextualize you know maybe we're talking about something because a new study came out. But what do the other studies say? And those systematic reviews can be a really fantastic resource, in the other there are other things what are what other things do we think about? So we think about conflicts of interest, we think about putting research into context and using systematic reviews. We also try not to hype the findings of studies or claims that are being made by you know, university press offices... Very often the results are over blowing or people have maybe over interpreted them or exaggerated that. I think it's often important to kind of emphasize, you know, the uncertainties, the things that are the unknowns or things that are still very much up for debate so, I think, yeah, those are a few things, few ways, we can improve our reporting in health. Okay. What tips would you give to the public when reading a newspaper or posts in the social news media about health or health research? So, I would definitely try to think about going back to the original sources and just asking like what evidence is this claim based on. Sometimes you read studies like, you know, exercising for one minute is enough, you know, can do the same thing as an hour of exercise and then you find out it was like a study done on 12 mice and it's not actually generalizable to humans, or are relevant to humans, so you know, that process of like asking what evidence is this based on and then trying to look that up or and evaluate it yourself and see whether you think the claims that are being made in the social media post, or the news report, are actually supported by fine evidence that's there Yeah. And your final thoughts for our students. Any final thoughts... So I think health reporting is really, really, important you know it's one of the ways that not only people like regular patients or people consume News, but doctors also read health reporting to inform or to keep up-to-date on what's going on in journals. Health policymakers and ministers read reports to you know, inform the work they're doing and so being accurate and reliable and contextualized and being aware of the pitfalls like conflicts conflicts of interest in science I think are just really really important and I'm glad you're doing this course! Okay. Thank you, Julia, so much for your attention and for giving us this very rich interview. Bye Bye! No problem thank you, Tais See you. Bye! Bye.
