Campbell's puts the salt back into its soups

We start the week in the Daily Briefing with a salty story, global health and the CIA in Pakistan, and ideas for writing about AIDS.

Re-Salt: Last year, Campbell Soup made a big deal of a plan to gradually reduce salt in its products. This year, they are putting the salt back in its soups in the hopes of luring back customers. Nadia Arumugam at Forbes' Chew on This blog has the story with a rundown of competing salt studies.

Vaccines and the CIA: When American intelligence needed to confirm that Osama bin Laden was in the Abbottabad compound where he was captured, they traded on the trust afforded health workers offering vaccinations. The Guardian reported last week that they used a Pakistani doctor to try to confirm that bin Laden was indeed present. Over the weekend, Orin Levine, executive director of the International Vaccine Access Center, and the Council on Foreign Relations' Laurie Garrett wrote in the Washington Post's opinion pages that "the CIA's actions may have jeopardized the global polio eradication program" and damaged global health efforts.

AIDS Story Ideas: David J. Olson, director of Policy Communications at the Global Health Council, gives a good list of story ideas from an international conference in Rome at Blog 4 Global Health. He writes:

"My own sense is that 'treatment as prevention' and microbicides will be the biggest stories coming out of this conference, both because they are the current bright spots in HIV prevention and because recent research has been published on both interventions.

But I hope that reporters go beyond treatment as prevention and microbicides - very important stories that everyone will be covering - and look into other angles, such as male circumcision, stigma, cost implications, co-infection with other diseases and non-communicable diseases. These are the stories that don't get the coverage they deserve, and reporters can distinguish themselves by examining these relatively unexamined stories."

(Photo "Campbell's soup aisle" by Matthew Hurst on Flickr Creative Commons)

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