Portrayal Of Disease Research Articles

Representing quarantine on film: fearing the monster inside

ABSTRACT Fictional representations of contagion, that is epidemic or pandemic in film, mainly fall within the genres of fantasy, horror, or science fiction, while their narratives focus on fear and panic, on disturbance of the social equilibrium. Approaching the film interpretations of the subject from the perspective of biopolitics as it is understood by Giorgio Agamben, this paper explores how media products of the postmodern era, created several decades apart and originating from different productions and geopolitical circumstances, interpret the idea of isolation in quarantine as a means of questioning the nature of humanity. Variola Vera, a Yugoslav film from the 80s, produced in Eastern Europe at the peak of postmodernism is juxtaposed against the most recent To the Lake, a TV show produced in Russia and distributed on Netflix. As fictional representations of epidemics, they demonstrate a clear and consistent pattern in the portrayal of disease and quarantine, deploying tropes of the outbreak narrative in constructing the texts and relating it to the postmodern horror film. Before all, theyask the question “If one is not a human being, what is one?” when the social management of contagion is conceived spatially: as quarantine, as isolation.”

Choroba i jej metafory w twórczości współczesnych polskich poetek

The article deals with metaphors of disease in selected contemporary Polish female poets. In focus are the portrayals of disease, its symptoms and consequences for the imperfect human body. The anthropological perspective assumed in this study, which reveals the coding of human experience in a literary work, emphasises the connections between the poetics of the work and the problem of defining individual identity. The analysis leads to the following conclusions: the poets (both in lyrical poetry and other intimist writing) usually relate to conceptual metaphors motivated by the notions of object and containment (e.g. life is a container, body is an object, body is a container); other recognizable metaphors are orientational (wpaść w wilczy dół ‘fall into the pitfall’) or grounded in the notion of fire (czuję się spalona ‘I feel consumed by flames’). By modifying classic metaphors, the poets construct new cognitive perspectives. They express the feeling of isolation from the world of the healthy and the fragility of the human body as a material “prison house”. They also make attempts to regain control over it by extending the boundaries of intimacy. By studying the esthetic and epistemological aspects of metaphors in connection with an understanding of self in a situation of irreversible loss of full physical control, of fear and of bold expansion of one’s corporality, it is possible to identify individual and cultural grounding of corporality.

Pushing Contagion: How Government Agencies Shape Portrayals of Disease

Pushing Contagion: How Government Agencies Shape Portrayals of Disease

Defining a Crisis: the Impact of Attention and Crisis Language on Diabetes in America

Public health crises are shaped by the nature of public discourse surrounding them. Attention and portrayal of disease in the media and advocacy from interest groups play a significant role in defining, labeling, and framing health threats in the United States. The frequency of coverage and the use of crisis language in the public discourse determine issue salience and creates a discursive epidemic that coincides with medical threats. Diabetes presents a growing challenge for public health in the U.S. due to its rising prevalence in the population; however, it also represents an important example of how health crisis are portrayed. This paper examines how media coverage and advocacy group portrayals of diabetes have evolved. Taking a longitudinal approach, media archives and advocacy group publications are examined, focusing on the period from 1985 to 2014. Finally, this paper seeks to use the coverage of diabetes as a reflection of public discourse and the nature of public health crises. This research falls at the intersection of several fields of study, including media effects, communication, psychology, and political behavior. The perception of a crisis and its surrounding discourse shape public perception and determine political and social response. Specifically, observing the frequency and content of language used to discuss diabetes in America can reveal the dynamics of communication in the public sphere and why some issues are salient while others are not.

Abstract A28: Multiplexed immunofluorescence in formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded prostate cancer

Abstract Traditional immunohistochemistry serves as a vital diagnostic assay as it allows for semiquantitatively probing the magnitude and spatial distribution of protein expression and posttranslational modifications. Unfortunately, an accurate portrayal of disease often requires several immunohistochemical stains, which are run on separate tissue sections. The application of transcriptomics analyses in cancer classification has led to the generation of multivariate index analyses that confer diagnostic, prognostic, and predictive signatures of disease. However this method is limited by the inability consider target expression in the context of tissue (stroma, epithelium) or cell (e.g. stem/progenitor cells) type. A unifying platform that would allow for the quantitative spatial analysis of multiplexed in situ target measurements promises to exploit the best features of both systems. To this end, we have developed a novel multiplexed fluorescence immunohistochemistry assay that is capable of quantitative analysis of >25 antigens in a single formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissue section, as well as image and data analysis capabilities for analyzing the multidimensional data. By inclusion of targets for cell and tissue compartments, including nuclei, cytoplasm and membrane, we have demonstrated the ability to investigate subcellular protein expression, phosphorylation and co-localization in individual cells. In the present study we have stained a cohort of 79 prostate cancer patients of varying Gleason grades for a total of 24 antigens, representing key mediators of cell signaling, tumor suppressors and oncogenes, tumor associated phenotypic targets, and structural proteins. The images are precisely registered and segmented into individual cells nuclear, cytoplasmic and membrane regions and the underlying expression of a given antigen is then quantitatively determined in each compartment by automated algorithms. With the advent of this new tool, we aim to define new prognostic molecular signatures in prostate cancer. Citation Information: Clin Cancer Res 2010;16(14 Suppl):A28.

Portrayal of Childhood Cancer in English Language Magazines in North America: 1970–2001

ABSTRACT This article is a content and discourse analysis of the portrayal of childhood cancer in English language magazines in North America. In a unique specification of published research on the media portrayal of disease, magazines were divided into three market or audience groupings called (1) science, (2) news/special interest, and (3) other (women/teen/parenting/health). The predominate frames or discoursesin these three groups were compared and differences were found amongst them and discussed in the article. Considerable evidence suggests that people with cancer are stigmatized. In the analyzed media focused on children, those with cancer are highly idealized and stereotyped. On the one hand, this can be thought of as a very positive portrayal of children in this situation. Children are described as if they possess heroic and idealized character traits, appearances, social characteristics, and personalities. Possible links between this idealized, polarized, and biased portrayal of children with cancer and their documented experiences of stigma are discussed.

Media Portrayal of Disease from the Medical, Political Economy, and Life-Style Perspectives

There are three competing explanations of disease and its treatment: the medical, life-style, and political economy models. Each of these models is used as a presupposition for health policy. The mass media are one source of information about disease and health policy. This research examines the incidence of each of these models of disease in the portrayal of cancer, heart disease, and AIDS in six mass-circulating magazines from 1980 to 1987.

Pathologic Basis of Disease

The pathology textbooks of the 1930s and 1940s mirrored the teaching of pathology at a low ebb: a descriptive discipline rich in color, shapes, and culinary allusions, but imprisoned by the autopsy and satisfied with the portrayal of disease as static morbid anatomy. After the war there were hopeful rebellions, and several splinter books appeared. Especially notable was Sir Howard Florey's General Pathology , around which rallied those departments of pathology that revered the new science of cell biology. Wiley D. Forbus attempted to bring movement and dynamism back to pathology with Reaction to Injury , which unfortunately never caught on. No one, however, approached pathology as a clinical discipline, and only Boyd demonstrated elegance of style. W. A. D. Anderson captured the mainstream; his monumental work (introduced in 1948, and now in its eighth edition, edited by J. W. Kissane) continued the tradition of obsessive cataloging, gradually introducing dynamic concepts as