If you’re looking for H1N1 PSA videos to embed on your station’s swine-flu page (or in a story), check out the full selection available on flu.gov. You’ll find the swine-flu rap that won HHS’s PSA video contest, PBS’s Sid the Science Kid video, Sesame Street’s Elmo videos (some also in Spanish), and messages from some celebrities and members of Congress.
You might also be interested in these more unusual alternatives. I found them using keyword searches on YouTube and Vimeo — a process very similar to looking for H1N1 photos on Flickr. (Like Flickr, both YouTube and Vimeo have a wealth of terrible or plagiarized H1N1 offerings, but if you sort carefully, you can find gems.)
Kevin Krasko from Cranston, RI, explains that he made his H1N1 PSA with his friend Ethan “for a video contest at the University of Rhode Island.” It’s very clever. (Kevin neglects to mention that he and Ethan won first prize in the contest.)
[Kevin Krasko / Vimeo]
If you’re looking for another college-made PSA, Rutgers University’s Wake Up Rutgers TV show put out its own prevention message last month.
Finally: a look back to the swine-flu scare of 1976. The two entertaining PSAs in this video appear to have been produced by the U.S. Public Health Service, but we weren’t able to confirm their authenticity (more on this below).
Jeff Krulik, who posted these videos on YouTube, claims they are “from the voluminous shelves of the National Archives.” We contacted NARA ourselves to double check, but the friendly staff said it doesn’t have the resources to watch the video and match it to what they have. If you’d like to do your own research, you can type “swine flu” into this NARA search box — or you could contact the motion picture division for the full catalog.
