Insights

<p><em>We have a guest post today from <a href="http://www.reportingonhealth.org/users/ivanoransky">Ivan Oransky</a>, executive editor of Reuters Health and co-author of the newish Embargo Watch and Retraction Watch blogs. Here, he has some tips for dealing with embargoed medical research. </em></p>

<p>Only if you were too caught up in celebrity divorces this week could you have missed the latest blockbuster investigation from ProPublica: <a href="http://www.propublica.org/topic/dollars-for-doctors">Dollars for Docs</a>.</p>

<p>Here’s what we’re checking out today:</p> <p><strong>Nutrition:</strong> Irony alert: Chicago public schoolchildren <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/ct-met-school-gardens-20101019,0,4…’t eat the healthy, organic produce they grow in their school gardens</a> because of rules that commercial growers <em>don’t have to follow</em>.&nbsp;</p>

<p>For the viewing, I sported green Nike running shoes and a 2nd hand brown suit. I thought I looked fine. But on the way over to the church, my friend, who I'll call Tony, laid into me:</p> <p>"You look like an idiot. What the hell are you doing wearing that? You're the only fool I know that would go to a funeral dressed like you're running to a 1975 prom."</p>

<p>For the first time in U.S. history, the current generation of children have a lower life expectancy than their parents, due mostly to obesity and other diet-related diseases.</p> <p>The strain on our health-care system caused by diabetes and obesity alone can be calculated in the billions. We are just beginning to see the extreme negative ramifications to our communal health brought about by the switch in the 50’s and 60’s from a local farming culture to a food culture based on super-markets and fast-food restaurants.<span>&nbsp;</span></p>

<p><!--StartFragment--></p><p class="MsoNormal">Really painful but doable. Not as bad as I expected. Those are my first answers when someone asks me about the birth of my son. I always tell people that the most difficult part for me was after the birth, especially when it came to breastfeeding.</p>

<p>This year's <a href="http://www.reportingonhealth.org/fellowships/seminars/california-health… Health Journalism Fellows</a> are pursuing stories important to communities. They're investigating air quality, the on-the-ground effects of health care reform and children's health, and asking important questions about how neighborhoods can be healthier. Here's a quick rundown of some of their projects, with links to their own blog posts so you can learn more, comment and offer ideas.</p>

<p>I had a hunch that Carolyn Cannuscio had a story teller’s heart when she plucked out this detail from a Philadelphia city-dweller account of gentrification: ‘One woman described the way she saw her “people being pulled out like sweet potatoes, roots and all—and their health has never been the same since.’”</p>

<p>San Francisco and the Bay Area is, in many ways, a microcosm of much of America. As a metaphor for the extremes of environmental wealth and poverty in America today, you can walk 10 short San Francisco blocks from 6th and Market to 1001 Taylor Street. In that short distance, your walk spans the divide between&nbsp;an area where&nbsp;homeless men lie in igloos of wool blankets as urine trickles down a crack in the sidewalk,&nbsp;up to where&nbsp;Grace Cathedral's soaring&nbsp;Ghiberti Doors, known as the gates of paradise, open over Nob Hill.

<p>For the first time, this fellowship gives me the opportunity to do a health story right.</p> <p>Health issues usually mean big trouble when it’s breaking news or an investigative story.</p> <p>Agent Orange. Ebola virus. West Nile. H1N1. In their time, viruses, pesticides and other causes of sudden, mass illnesses have forced all of us who cover the news to drop what we’re doing and take a crash course in an unexpected health crisis.</p>