UAB Magazine Online Features
Sell It With Soap
Radio Dramas Tell Public Health Stories
By Jo Lynn Orr
Pam Cook and Emana Rachelle share the microphone during a recording session for Camberwell, a soap opera with a public health message that is produced by UAB professor
Connie Kohler.Serialized melodramas—called soaps or soap operas because they once were sponsored by soap and detergent manufacturers—have been a popular staple of American broadcasting since the 1930s, first on radio and then television. Soaps resonate with audiences because they feature a permanent cast of characters who grapple with the types of challenging family and health problems that most people confront at some point in their lives. They also rely on the five Cs of a good story—character, change, crisis, choice, and consequences—which keeps audiences tuning in to find out how events are unfolding.
Because of their broad audience appeal, some public health experts have adopted the soap-opera format as a vehicle for communicating important health messages to targeted audiences. One UAB researcher, Connie Kohler, Dr.P.H., a professor in the Department of Health Behavior at the School of Public Health, teamed with Media for Health, a nonprofit entertainment-education organization in Birmingham, to create a radio drama that targeted the African-American community with important health messages about nutrition, coping with stress, and confronting diabetes and heart disease—two chronic diseases that disproportionately affect blacks. Called BodyLove, which also was the name of the beauty salon where the action took place, the award-winning soap first aired in 2003 on WJLD in Birmingham and ran for more than five years.
Bridging the Gaps
By Jo Lynn Orr | Illustration by Tim Rocks
What is the end result of research? How do the therapies and interventions that scientists develop actually reach the public? Why do new treatments quickly reach academic medical centers like UAB but move on to community hospitals and health clinics much more slowly, if at all? Is a cheaper but less-effective therapy better than one that is more effective but too expensive to be adopted in the real world?
Wynne E. Norton, Ph.D., specializes in asking—and answering—just these kinds of questions. As an expert in the relatively new field of implementation science (IS), she looks for ways to apply research results and other evidence-based findings to real-world practice in health-care and public health settings.
Wynne Norton specializes
in applying research results
and other evidence-based findings
to real-world practice. The Science of Solutions
Studies indicate that it takes 17 years for patients to benefit from just 14 percent of original research, says Norton, an assistant professor in UAB’s Department of Health Behavior in the School of Public Health. “IS seeks to speed up this process, and many agencies within the National Institutes of Health are on board with this goal,” she says. “The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality also is interested in the health-care delivery aspect, as well as in scale-up and spread, which is an extension of IS that involves facilitating widespread adoption of reliable strategies for effecting evidence-based services.”
Grading the Curve
UAB Exercise Physiologist Evaluates Popular “Toning” Shoes
By Matt Windsor
When UAB exercise scientist Jane Roy, Ph.D., sees the sexed-up commercials for new “toning” shoes from the likes of Reebok and Skechers, she can’t help but think about something a little less attractive: ankle weights.
Toning shoes feature a curved sole that is intended to re-create the instability of walking on a less stable surface, like sand. Forcing the body to overcome that instability, shoe manufacturers claim, turns a normal walk into a whole-body workout capable of sculpting the legs, bottom, and chest. (These areas get far more screen time in commercials than the shoes themselves.)
The slick ads and celebrity endorsements have fueled blockbuster sales—toning shoes are now the fastest-growing corner of the athletic shoe market. But despite all the hype, the craze is reminiscent of “the ankle-weight fad of the 1980s and ‘power walkers’ swinging hand weights,” Roy says. For modern toning shoes and their fitness cousins, the idea is the same, she notes: “to make movement more difficult and challenging, and to increase energy expenditure.”
Breaking Through
Discovery Reshapes Textbooks and TB Treatment
By Chris Jones
Discoveries in the lab of Michael Niederweis have helped reshape scientists' understanding of the bacterium that causes tuberculosis.Michael Niederweis, Ph.D., has spent most of his career trying to breach two formidable barriers. The first is the cell wall of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis (TB), which causes more deaths each year than any other bacterial pathogen. The second is the opposition of the TB research community, which has been slow to accept the UAB microbiologist’s revolutionary discovery about that wall.
Bacteria have evolved two types of cell walls to protect themselves from their environments. Some have a slimy, sugary coat while others have an outer membrane, like the wall of a fortress. TB researchers had long believed that the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacterium had a cell wall that was unique but nevertheless similar to the sugar-coated bacteria. But Niederweis and his team have shown evidence for an outer membrane, a finding that could have a profound impact on the development of new TB drugs.
