When I was a young child, you would often see government adverts on the TV concerning health & safety issues. They were called Public Information Films or PIF for short. One of the more graphic was of a women serving in a butcher shop, who sneezes or coughs into her hands then, without gloves on, picks up the bacon, weighs it, wraps it and hands it to the customer.

That short black and white film was shown on TV in the 1960s/70s and it made a lasting impact on me. Since that time I’ve always washed my hands after visiting the bathroom, before preparing food and on various other occasions. But in the pre-coronavirus days, we, as a society seemed to have lost that message. Probably because it has never been repeated. PIFs in Britain were renowned for the way they presented the obvious to viewers and these started way back in time, before TV even and were shown on cinemas across the nation post world war 2. Here’s a good example from the 1940s concerning the spread of germs.

You rarely see these types of adverts these days, which is a shame, because one thing I always remember from growing up in Britain in the sixties and seventies was slogans like, Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases.

It seems to me, if we had more modern messaging like this, then the spread of Covid-19 may have been a little less dramatic and maybe even save a few lives.

Copyright © Tom Kane 2020

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