Teenage pregnancy and reporting

There have been a number of reports in the last few weeks with headlines ranging from "Teen mums shock" from the Ulster Herald to "UK has 'highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe' " from the Independent.

Unfortunately they largely miss the point. The original report that has prompted these articles is from Population Action International, and is the result of a worldwide survey of 130 countries to demonstrate that "Despite 20 years of campaigning to improve the reproductive health of women throughout the world, the risk of dying in pregnancy or childbirth shows the largest gap between the rich and poor of all development statistics. "

It doesn't compare the UK with the rest of western Europe because it doesn't include all of western Europe - Greece, Portugal, Austria are, amongst others, missing. I'm not suggesting that would necessarily change the position of the UK, I don't know the figures, but it is sloppy reporting.

What it does show is that the UK is in the enviable-to-some position of being among the 28 countries with the lowest reproductive risk, and among these are Cuba, China and Singapore from the developing world. All the rest are high income countries. In comparison with other places in the world "Motherhood is safe; skilled care at childbirth is universal and the risk of death from pregnancy or delivery is extremely low. Infant mortality is rare. Contraceptive use is high. Early marriage is rare. Abortion is unrestricted. Adolescent fertility and HIV prevalence are low."

At the opposite end of the scale, skilled care during pregnancy and childbirth is limited; infant and maternal mortality are high or very high; contraceptive use is generally low; there is very high unmet need for contraception; very early marriage is common; adolescent fertility is high; abortion policies are mostly restrictive; levels of HIV infection are moderate to high.

I'm not trying to say that we should be ignoring anything that could be improved in these countries, but we do need to look beyond our immediate horizons.

This narrowly focused reporting is along the lines of "Thousands die, no British people involved". (So that's all right then).

Chinese Whispers/Telephone game

The BBC recently published a news article with the heading: “Med diet ‘could prevent asthma’”. A little further into the article it changes the message slightly to say that diet could help control asthma symptoms, which is really quite different. If you read the abstract of the original article in Thorax it is slightly different again. “A high level of adherence to the Mediterranean diet was protective for allergic rhinitis while a more modest protection was observed for wheezing and atopy.” Additionally, the study was carried out on children living in rural Crete, so whether this is going to translate into a benefit for children living in urban Britain, or urban anywhere else, is another matter.

In this instance it’s not a big deal. Eating a Mediterranean diet would do no harm but it seems to me to be another case of sloppy reporting. Does nobody look at the reports with a critical eye? Do they have non-scientists writing up these findings? Or is it just another example of journalists wanting to make a story with only an approximation to the truth? Or indeed, is it just a case of Chinese Whispers, where the message becomes distorted each time it is told?