Culture Matters in Communicating the Global Response to COVID-19.

Current communication messages in the COVID-19 pandemic tend to focus more on individual risks than community risks resulting from existing inequities. Culture is central to an effective community-engaged public health communication to reduce collective risks. In this commentary, we discuss the importance of culture in unpacking messages that may be the same globally (physical/social distancing) yet different across cultures and communities (individualist versus collectivist). Structural inequity continues to fuel the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on black and brown communities nationally and globally. PEN-3 offers a cultural framework for a community-engaged global communication response to COVID-19.

Toward a new communications framework for HIV/AIDS.

In response to the overwhelming burden of new cases of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), in 1997, initiated a project to examine the application of existing communication theories/models to HIV/acquired immune deficiency virus (AIDS) prevention and care in these regions. In the past 2 years, 103 leading researchers and practitioners from different parts of the world were invited by the UNAIDS to participate in one of five consultative workshops designed to review these theories/models and rethink their adequacy for Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. A new communications framework for HIV/AIDS was developed to move from a focus on the individual to a focus on five domains of "contexts" that influence behaviors: government policy, socioeconomic status (SES), culture, gender relations, and spirituality.