About CDC
Hot Links
Conferences & Events
Picturing Health: Norman Rockwell and the Art of IllustrationMarch 10 - June 4, 2008
Organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum, rare, original paintings exploring the importance of physical fitness, health and healing across the generations. Joined by original works with similar themes by today's most prominent visual artists.
CDC is creating new ways of providing meaningful and credible health information to our constituents. The immersive and interactive experience of virtual worlds makes this platform an ideal place to encourage modeling, or practicing, of health behaviors. Modeling is an activity that proves to lead to changes in behavior. CDC currently has activities in two virtual worlds: Whyville and Second Life.
Whyville: CDC collaborated with Whyville, a popular virtual world for children aged 8—11-years-old, to promote seasonal flu vaccinations to Whyvillian children and their grandparents.This year there were more than 40,000 “virtual” vaccinations, and nearly 2,000 grandparents participated in the in-world activities, between November 2007 and mid-January 2008. The exercise also served to increase awareness about the importance of seasonal flu vaccination before and during the 2007—2008 flu season.
Second Life: A popular virtual world where members can create an avatar and interact with other members. CDC is currently working on building an island in Second Life where avatars can interact with health content, get health-related information, and ask questions.
MySpace: CDC networks with MySpace users to provide MySpace friends with relevant health and safety information. On the CDC MySpace site, users can view relevant and timely blogs, watch CDC videos, upload campaign badges to display on their individual MySpace pages, and much more.
Podcasts: CDC is using podcasts as a new method of distributing audio and video files over the Internet for playback on personal devices or computers. By making CDC information available in new formats, CDC.gov users can now access relevant health information anytime from their personal devices, subscribe to podcasts series that are of particular interest, or watch health videos from their computers.
