5th Nutrition and Health Communication Conference

The 5th Nutrition and Health Communication Conference organized by the Sabri Ülker Foundation took place with a focus on health communication during the pandemic period. The Nutrition and Health Communication initiative, one of the Sabri Ülker Foundation's projects aimed at sharing scientific knowledge with the public in the fields of health and nutrition, was realized through an international-scale conference. During the pandemic process that has become part of the world's agenda as a global health crisis, health journalism was addressed by expert figures. The Sabri Ülker Foundation, which pursues sustainable projects with the goal of contributing to the future of public health and delivering accurate and up-to-date information obtained from reliable sources to all segments of society on nutrition, food and healthy living topics, held the 5th Nutrition and Health Communication Conference on an international scale. At the conference held under the theme Health Communication in the Age of Pandemic, expert figures from Turkey and around the world discussed health journalism during the pandemic process in all its details. The conference, which took place online under the moderation of Prof. Ali Atıf Bir, Director of the Institute of Communication Sciences, began with opening remarks by Talat İçöz, Chairman of the Sabri Ülker Foundation. Following İçöz, Begüm Mutuş, General Director of the Sabri Ülker Foundation, went live and shared the names of domestic and foreign guests participating in the conference, thanking them for their contributions. The conference's first speaker was Prof. Serhat Ünal, Head of the Department of Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology at Hacettepe University School of Medicine and Director of the Vaccine Institute, who addressed pandemic cases experienced globally from the past to the present in various forms and the measures taken against these cases. Ünal, stating that changing living conditions have caused us to experience the Covid-19 pandemic in more severe dimensions, shared that many factors such as global warming, population growth, damage to nature and resources, and living in close contact with wildlife have made the pandemic risky on a global scale. Emphasizing that new variants will inevitably continue due to the nature of the outbreak and that vaccine, mask, distance and hygiene should be at the forefront of measures to be taken, Ünal said: "The only thing that will completely eliminate the pandemic process is the completion of vaccination applications worldwide and the creation of community immunity." Following Prof. Serhat Ünal, Prof. Ali Ergur, Faculty Member in the Department of Sociology at Galatasaray University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, went live and addressed the fact that Covid-19 was the first global health crisis. Prof. Ergur stated: "Throughout history, although many epidemics have resulted in serious losses, they have occurred in limited areas, whereas the Covid-19 pathogen spread at the highest rate of any epidemic, affecting the entire world. Therefore, Covid-19 is the first global health crisis and epidemic," and described the sociological impacts experienced beyond the health dimension of the outbreak. Prof. Ergur said: "The understanding of individualism has been completely destroyed by the Covid-19 epidemic, equalizing class differences. The wrongness of the consumption frenzy and steps towards the consumption of nature that dominated societies before the epidemic has exacted a great price from humanity." Underlining that the process has shifted from medical struggle to societal struggle, Ergur stated: "In this period where all values have collided, the change and rupture that has occurred should direct societies toward concrete production and collective action."