Here we check in with prominent health journalists and experts to see what sites, newsletters and social media feeds they turn to first every morning. This week, we caught up with Liza Gross, freelance health journalist and senior editor of PLOS Biology. Here are her top morning reads.
Community Engagement
California's psychiatric hospitals can be highly dangerous places, both for patients and staff. Lost work days and overtime pay are huge. But reporters looking to track down reliable data on assaults face an uphill climb.
In 2010, a nurse at Napa State Hospital walked back to her ward after dinner, following the same path she’d taken hundreds of times before. But this time, she ran into a patient who should never have been allowed to roam the hospital grounds unsupervised.
Reporter Liza Gross was seeking a fresh way to convey the risky environmental conditions facing California farming communities. But after running into a series of data swamps, she turned to experts for help and unexpectedly found her story in the strawberry fields of Oxnard, Calif.
As the Affordable Care Act rolls out in 2014, tens of millions of uninsured Americans will gain access to health coverage. But at least 3 million Californians will remain uninsured, including low-income adults and 1 million undocumented residents.
Where you live—and who you are—plays a big part in how long you’ll live. If you live in poverty in California’s San Joaquin Valley, and you're Latino, you’re twice as likely to die prematurely as someone who is white and lives in an upper-class community.
How could legislation designed to protect people from suspected cancer-causing compounds in furniture foam fail to pass? Experts say lobbying money had a lot to do with it. Here's how I tracked the millions of dollars spent by the chemical industry to defeat the bill.