How to make money on doping and fake medicines?
Journalists will receive an award for reporting on shady pharmaceutical businessRemedium
The Association of German Medical Journalists (Verband Deutscher Medizinjournalisten, VDMJ) will pay a Prize for European journalists, which is sponsored by Bayer HealthCare AG for the eighth time.
According to Bayer's announcement today, the winners of the award were announced in early July 2010.
This year, the jury received 53 applications from print, radio and television media, 11 of them came from other European countries. The overall quality was quite high, and the jury decided to divide the prize between two equally outstanding materials.
Half of the award will be paid to the Austrian television journalist Martin Thur for his television program "Special Edition of ATV – Doping in mass sports", which was shown on June 22, 2009 on ATV channel, the largest private TV channel in Austria.
Tyur's dynamic, entertaining and richly illustrated reportage introduces viewers to the world of doping, which has long embraced not only professional athletes, but also the amateur sports world. The prison clearly illustrates the underestimated scale of the problem and the serious health consequences. He describes the dizzying development of a thriving black market of relevant substances, which is controlled by a doping mafia-like drug business.
Martin Tyr is an Austrian, he started his career as a journalist on the regional channel P3 in St. Pelten, the capital of Lower Austria. Having worked for some time in other broadcasting companies, he now works as an editor in the news department of the ATV channel in Vienna, while he is also responsible for the preparation of special television releases.
The second half of the award will be paid to the German medical journalist Dr. Helmut Nordwig for his radio program "Fake pills through shadow channels - a study of the criminal world of counterfeit medicines", which was broadcast on the Bavarian channel Bayern 2 – December 17, 2009. Nordwig explores the problem of counterfeit medicines, which has reached global proportions in the era of the Internet.
In detailed analyses, he describes the volume of systematic trade in counterfeit drugs, sheds light on the underlying criminal interests and considers a variety of risks for the buyer. With the help of background music and text inserts from the film "The Third Man", he reminds listeners that the harmful effects of the trade in "diluted" penicillin were already described after World War II by Graham Greene in his novel of the same name.
Dr. Helmut Nordwig studied chemistry in Munich, where he received his doctorate. After working for some time at the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, he began working full-time as a freelance scientific and medical journalist, mainly for ARD radio stations (including Bayerischer Rundfunk, Westdeutscher Rundfunk and Deutschlandfunk). Nordvig lives in Furstenfeldbruck.
"Both laureates have shown that painstaking investigation allows you to create an exciting narrative. They made public not too well–known facts, and at the same time showed a very important journalistic quality, considering the issues in the appropriate context," emphasizes the chairman of the jury, Professor Dr. Annette Lessmelmann, Professor of journalism, specialization - scientific journalism, University of Darmstadt.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru14.07.2010