DataNomad

Using my own experience in 2015, let me show you how this @BBCAfrica article (and the others) can harm society. In 2015, I wrote [wrongly] about the dangers of fluid boluses ( that rapid intravenous fluids for treatment). Three days later, three mothers in a hospital here in Nairobi were demanding that their critically ill children be unhooked from the life-saving intravenous fluids. By the time the Kenya Paediatric Association came around to sort it out, so much harm had been done by those few words. For a newsjacking story (such as this one), a reporter would need, at the bare minimum: 1) Evidence of potential harm: There must have been a woman who used this product and was harmed. None of that was provided in any of the stories by the platforms that carried this, including @citizentvkenya. 2) Corroboration: An actual person with a face and name who used these allergy medicines for "vaginal tightening"; another person who saw the product and did not use it, and their reasons why. 3) Expert evidence: A health expert who has attended to people who misused this product; a pharmacist who has sold a lot of it and suspected it was being used for the wrong purpose. NONE of this was in those stories. We need to go back to old-school journalism that lives by a simple rule of verification: you need to hear it, touch it, see it or smell it to claim it happened or exists. Also, when @MOH_Kenya and @PSofKenya are forced to issue statements about cooked-up issues, very soon, bodies, once revered as sources of truth, will be treated as just another source of gossip. When the time comes for them to address deadly diseases like measles/Ebola and issues concerning vaccines, nobody will believe them. Basically, journalists allowed accounts like @sholard_mancity to create non-existent problems and allowed misinformation to determine what they should cover. These accounts are now cooking up another bizarre tale about Panadol, and I assure you, there will be a headline about it. Now, here is the sad thing. There's someone who will not see those rebuttals from the experts (just as the mothers did not see Dr Githanga's and Prof Grace Irimu's responses to my piece). They will only see the wrong information, and they may actually insert that allergy medicine into their vagina, with potentially serious health consequences.