Health Lit

I think my first experience with health literacy was volunteering at a Children's Safety Center. I was writing press releases to be distributed to the local media regarding the safety center's topics of the month. At the time it was a little challenging to write about health statistics in a way that could be easily understood by the general population. And, to be honest, I didn't have the knowledge that I do now about average reading level in America. Somehow I managed, but I have recently been using my health literacy knowledge and skills at the Alzheimer's Association to create educational pamphlets about living a brain healthy lifestyle. I am more aware now about wording and sentence structure to ensure that they are easy to understand and written in a way that is not too scientific and full of jargon. I think that these skills will definitely come in handy when writing about the new Gardasil vaccine for men. Especially because we want to increase knowledge about HPV and it's relation to genital warts and cervical cancer.