Fusing Disease Awareness with Entertainment

I think Philanthropy is a great thing but i do have my reservations when it comes to raising awareness of diseases e.g Cancer, HIV etc. There seems to be a trend in fusing entertainment to a cause to raise awareness of diseases. Not that i think this is a terrible idea, i just question the effectiveness. I understand that entertainment gets people to events and probably keeps them there in the hope they learn a thing or two about the disease in question. the problem i  have with this method is, after all the glitz, glam, red carpet and champagne are all gone, will the health message people are trying to pass across sink in? And if so, for how long?

I feel if you need to give people incentives to take care of their health or be aware of health issues that they may be susceptible to then there is absolutely no point. The way i see it, without good health, no one can achieve anything in this life and so this should be top priority for every individual..sadly this is not the reality as people often have poor health seeking behaviours.

Cancer and HIV for instance are serious diseases and if people feel they need fashion, music and any form of entertainment to face this reality, then perhaps as a society, we need to find other ways to effectively pass the messages across. I for one have been to one of such events and no one even spoke about the disease awareness bit after the 15 minute slide show presentation that literally made people snooze. People were more concerned about the Glitz and glam and of course the music and fashion show. I really dont think this is appropriate. if people are serious about their health, then events should be held specifically for disease awareness with no incentive to attend. That way one is sure that those in attendance are serious about learning and will definitely leave the event spreading awareness and making lifestyle changes.

I think this is important in the African continent as we are still faced with a double burden of infectious and communicable diseases, topped with HIV and lots of Injuries caused by accidents and natural disasters. We should be taking these things a bit more seriously. There's no point copying the west in the way they raise awareness, they are an advanced society that have appropriate preventative measures in place. Africa on the other hand can not boast of this. So if we must raise awareness, lets do just that.