DMD in television novel

[David Feder]

In Brazil television novel is a fever. There are more than 3 novels in each channel. The audience of principal novel in the principal channel is 70% of all televisions. Brazil export novels to other countries. Penultimate chapter of the novel “Paginas da Vida” included a boy with DMD. Italo is a patient of ABDIM (Brazilian Association of Muscular Dystrophy). He participated with two famous actors. Italo explain about DMD: symptoms, diagnose, physical limitations, physiotherapy, accessibility and prejudice. This is a social marketing of the novel. This is the best way to make DMD a knowledge disease. We need the involvement of general society in our fight. I can’t translate the video to English until this moment. After, you can see some beautiful images from Rio de Janeiro.
You can see the movie in this link:
www.distrofiamuscular.net/novel.wmv

[Glen]

I speak Spanish so I was able to understand a lot of the text. What a great thing! This type of thing is one of the best things that can happen to raise awareness of DMD. Now we just have to find a way to include something similar on American Idol (it's the only thing that's comparable in popularity in the U.S. to telenovelas in South America).

Glen

[David Feder]

American Idol have a great audience (I like too). In USA there are several series about medicine (ER, HouseMD, Gray's Anatomy). They should give 60 seconds before the show to explain some diseases as muscular dystrophy.
The audience of novel in Brazil is 50 millions or more. I receive e-mails from people that never hear about muscular dystrophy and e-mails from people with other muscular diseases. The results of this participation was positive.