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 Some points that I found most surprising is how strong the media is when it comes to the spread of diseases. It seemed very accurate that it was due to the media’s influence that anorexia, an internal mental issue in my belief, spread so quickly across Hong Kong because people just decided that their symptoms and problems had to be associated with that. My older sister works at Boston children’s hospital and her stories also give me the same idea of the media. When the H1N1 virus broke out every parent that heard a slight cough come from their child ran to the hospital proclaiming that their child had the virus when 80% of the kids did not. If there was no media coverage on the H1N1 scare than most parents would treat the cough, as a normal cold and only when the sickness got a lot worse would try run to a hospital.

Now with this power of media I ask whether the media should take more responsibility and say in this case advise parents to not take evasive actions unless the child had been sick for a certain period of time instead of over crowding the hospitals and taking away from the patients that really need the help.