Late in the summer of 2007, residents of Castiglione di Cervia, Italy, began coming down with symptoms unusual for inhabitants of a small village in the plains of northern Italy. In the town of 2,000, more than 100 people were struck with a high fever, rashes, and crushing pain in their bones and joints - caused, doctors eventually discovered, by a tropical mosquito-borne infection called chikungunya.
When I began interviewing 17-year-old “Cindy,” she was reading a mystery while answering my questions. Then she put the book down, took her baby pet python from around her boyfriend's neck, and placed it inside her bra to warm it up....more_»
Conflict drives the most compelling stories, and HIV/AIDS has conflict at every turn.
Conflict ranges from scientists confronting each other with different ideas to mysteries, unkept promises, discovery, hype vs. hope, and the threat...more_»
The first time anyone heard Yvette Cade’s story, it went something like this, courtesy of a one-sentence pager message sent to newsrooms across Washington, DC: "Woman Set on Fire at Cell Phone Store."
As a longtime newspaper editor and reporter, I loved conflict and irony. And when the story pitted a parent against a child — especially an apple falling far from the tree — it was even better. Everybody can either relate or feel...more_»
It started on March 20, 2006, with what I thought was a one-shot story about the health care language gap. Two and a half years later, I am still writing follow-ups (more than 40 articles in all) about the story behind the original story ...more_»
Follow the money. That simple phrase – though never uttered by Bob Woodward’s most famous source – has propelled countless reporters to dig deeply into all manner of news stories.
And nearly four decades after Woodward and Carl...more_»
Imagine if your doctor asked your 12-year-old son to explain to you that you had just been diagnosed with cancer, or asked the hospital custodian who was walking by to weigh in on your CAT scan.
John Snow had the right idea more than 150 years ago as he investigated the cause of a cholera epidemic in London.
Snow, a physician, sketched a map of his Soho neighborhood streets, water pumps and cholera deaths. When he finished, he saw...more_»
Brian Bull recalls the first story he filed for South Dakota Public Radio. The young reporter spent a day with the Yankton Sioux as they sowed sand grapes and choke cherries and tilled gardens planted with other indigenous fruits and...more_»
Covering medical research is a lot like panning for gold. There's a lot to wade through before you're sure you've got a nugget that will make sense to laymen without exaggerating either the promise or peril.
There's no shortage of research...more_»
I began covering medicine in 1987 when AIDS was the biggest and most compelling national health story out there. Naturally, I thought I’d be spending most of my time writing about AIDS. I was wrong. As I made the rounds, talking to...more_»
I’ve worked in television news as a producer for 20 years, and I’ve found that it surprises my print colleagues to learn that we sometimes envy you. You can be so intimate. You arrive at a location, pull out a pen and paper, start...more_»
Not many reporters want to write about homeless people – and not many editors want to read about them. The subject is considered too depressing, too intractable. Not good reading over the breakfast table, as the saying goes. Too 1980s,...more_»
Debbie Crites had a secret.
When Crites visited the dental clinic in Fort Gay, West Virginia in the winter of 2007, her X-rays showed that two teeth were missing since the last time she visited. Her dentist, Dr. Dan Brody, was puzzled. What...more_»
I arrived in the hospital's neo-natal intensive care unit that night just after 7 p.m. I found a chair where I could see the baby. The parents arrived. The mother began crying. I opened my notebook and discreetly jotted down some notes.
And...more_»
As a veteran reporter whose first thought when approaching scientific, medical and health claims is to ask those behind the claims to "show me the evidence," I've long been cautious about many practices that fall under the rubric of ...more_»
Everybody knows that manufacturers of everything from cornflakes to cars pay screenwriters and producers handsomely for the placement of branded products in movies and TV shows.
It’s less widely known that stealth advertising is also used...more_»
There’s hardly a health story out there that cannot benefit from some good data – from estimates of the number of elderly Americans to hospital quality ratings for your community.
This article will help you find useful databases and...more_»
My odyssey into the world of tuberculosis began with a simple remark by a well-connected friend in the summer of 2007: "Have you heard that the county TB clinic is overwhelmed with cases?"
Although scientists and public health officials have long worried that an avian flu virus would spark the world's next influenza pandemic — and developed emergency plans for it — it is a mutated swine flu virus that has emerged as the...more_»
When several infectious disease doctors tipped me off about an outbreak of aggressive skin infections among gay men around Los Angeles in 2002, they initially suspected they might be seeing a new sexually transmitted disease.
The truth was...more_»
The Jackson County school nurses savor their monthly lunch meeting at the Crawford W. Long Pharmacy, a fixture on the courthouse square in Jefferson, Georgia. The rest of the time they’re too busy with the day-to-day demands of looking...more_»
Probably every health reporter in the country has been asked at one time or another to write a story about live organ donors. Such stories have become a staple of newspaper front pages and TV newscasts. Even so, few reporters have...more_»
