In case you don’t know, October happens to be health literacy month. What’s “health literacy” you ask? It’s basically “…the importance of understandable health information”. Think about medical materials that contain clinical jargon/words to describe complex medical issues. Think about a medical visit where you walked out more confused because you didn’t really understand what the doctor was saying (but were afraid to ask)… and even more so, if it’s right after you’ve received some news that you weren’t expecting. Health literacy is important — to learn more, visit the HHS “Guide to Writing and Designing Easy-to-Use Health Web Sites” and watch this Institute of Medicine (IOM) video for a broad perspective.

Anyway, today (October 7th), Healthfinder.gov will be having a live tweetchat with CDC’s Health Literacy Advisor, Cynthia Baur, from 2-3pm ET. To make it easy to follow along, I’ve created a “live feed” to capture the tweetchat using the hashtag #HealthLit (note: the feed will capture any conversation using the hashtag): Click here for the live feed via CoverItLive.

In case you didn’t know, today is World AIDS Day. Find out how you can participate over at AIDS.gov…

As part of the awareness-raising campaign, AIDS.gov and NIDA (National Institute of Drug Abuse) have partnered with Blog Catalog to host “Bloggers Unite on World AIDS Day“. Other initiatives around this event include:

1. Join the “Facing AIDS: World AIDS Day 2008” Campaign
2. Linking people to HIV testing centers via Text Messaging (KNOWIT)
3. Attending the World AIDS Day event in Second Life
4. Telling people about CDCs new HIV incidence data

As part of my contribution to the cause, I’ve embedded below an interview I did with Miguel Gomez (Director, AIDS.gov), together with Fred Smith (from CDC), earlier this year at the New Media Expo 2008.

I was going to post the interview as a podcast episode on Med 2.0 Radio, but there was a lot of background chatter from other folks in the room and noise from the event staff shutting down the room, so I decided not to post it as an official podcast, but this occasion offers a perfect opportunity to publish the content. Here’s the interview:

Standard Podcast [ 16:53 ] Play Now | Play in Popup

I’m also trying out a new service called VeoTag, which allows you to add chapters to the audio recording — feel free to try it out at the service and let me know what you think: Med 2.0 – Interview with Miguel Gomez (AIDS.gov) and Fred Smith (CDC). Hope you find it interesting!