Is the bird flu rolling towards us next? In North America it is already dealing with.
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At the beginning of pandemic, the podcast »Coronavirus-Update« was the most reliable and most accessible source of information that existed in the German media landscape. Every morning one of the world’s leading Corona experts, Dr. Christian Drosten, insights and views of the pathogen and its distribution, possible countermeasures and the state of research. The podcast, moderated by Korinna Hennig, Anja Martini and Beke Schulmann, has won more than half a dozen prizes; It was considered an outstanding example of constructive journalism – especially because he did not underwine the listeners.
Five years after the beginning of the pandemic, the NDR has launched an update to the update and produced another ten episodes that devote itself to the question of which teachings have drawn science from pandemic. Unlike in the original update, the consequences are set up as reports; It is about how laboratories work and work, such as zoonoses (i.e. from animal to human and vice versa transmitted pathogens), how veterinary medicine deals with pandemics and the long -term consequences of health such as long covid.
The question remains unclear: Can researchers hide behind politics?
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The podcast comes at the right time because research with Trump’s inauguration in the USA has to take a hard blow after the next. The complete infrastructure of US research is exposed to slash in slash; Doubts are appropriate whether a lot of relevant science can still be operated in the future. In view of the bird flu that is currently rampant in the USA and Canada, it is already evident today how a lack of state control and underfunding in science work: one simply does not know enough about this danger stove.
What you know is that the virus has jumped over to humans and that very likely human-to-human broadcasts have also taken place. This does not mean that a new pandemic threatens immediately, but they are warning signs to take a closer look at how the virus develops. However, this does not happen at least in the USA – the experts surveyed also sound worried accordingly or alarmed.
If you want to have a first overview of how the experts look at the current situation, the new season “Coronavirus-Update” is well served. What she does not want to afford, although the problem always appears marginally: a social reappraisal of the epidemics. The podcast focuses on medical perspectives and leaves out the socio -political outside. If at all, politics and society appear as fields that need to be ordered for science: In episode seven, there is a lot of communication and political advice, without asking the question to what extent medicine and research are already ideological in themselves.
Sometimes the larger intellectual framework that Corona has opened is missing. Not only that representatives of the medical disciplines have been noticed again and again through socio -political statements (who should be seen, for example, or how under the conditions of a pandemic, for example) – especially in the past work champion Germany, there would be potential to question, to the extent to which research can withdraw: We deliver knowledge that the classification must be made from politics. Hardly any other professional group was similarly involved in Nazi crimes; That doctors and researchers stand out and say that we leave the evaluation of others and do not take a position is optionally dramatic, irresponsible or at least naive. It would have been worth at least one episode to discuss sociological aspects. The concept of the podcast amounts to a reduction in the intellectual and social sciences, although this is not necessarily his fault. A cultural landscape that Richard David Precht accepts as a media lighthouse can be nothing more than a very flat desert.
This “coronavirus update” does not ask such questions. And will probably not do it in the future either. Because the successful channel will continue to be used by the ARD, but there is something different from now on: a series of “11km stories”, “A feed for exciting storytelling”, to which update maker Korinna Hennig invites: “Journalists of the ARD tell you in multi-part series true stories and deep research and how they have developed surprisingly.” Scroll deep down, all seasons of the “Coronavirus update” continue to find.
The “Coronavirus update” is freely accessible in the ARD audio library (ardaudiothek.de).