Insights

<p>Have you ever wanted to pick the brain of an investigative reporter? The California Endowment Health Journalism Fellows (Twitter hashtag #cahealthfellows) got the chance with former Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Bill Heisel, who also writes the thrice-weekly <a href="http://www.reportingonhealth.org/blogs/130">Antidote blog</a> for Center for Health Journalism Digital.&nbsp;</p>

<p><em>“I’m really ashamed I let myself get caught up in dishonest and deceitful campaigns really just so a few corporations and their Wall Street masters could become richer than they already are. So now, in a certain way, I’m trying to make amends.”</em></p>

<p>On Sunday, a four-part series a year in the making runs in the Bay Area News Group. As the science reporter for the chain, I teamed with health reporter Sandy Kleffman to report and write this series.</p>

<p>Bay Area News Group will begin a four part series on health inequities Sunday that will feature ZIP code maps revealing wide disparities in life expectancy, asthma hospitalizations, heart diease and cancer rates.</p><p>The project, by reporters Sandy Kleffman and Suzanne Bohan, found striking health differences among ZIP codes just a few miles apart.</p><p>Even middle-class neighborhoods are affected, the analysis reveals. Middle-class areas have longer life expectancies than the poorest neighborhoods, but fall years short of life expectancies in the wealthiest areas.</p>

<p>It’s not as seductive as a candlelit bedroom.</p> <p>But a dinner with medical colleagues after a board meeting can exert a powerful a pull on talented scientists flirting with the drug industry. Rarely one-on-ones, these dinners are usually threesomes:</p><p>1. The seducer: a representative for a medical communications company that has been hired by a drug company to help market a particular product or disease in need of new cures being cooked up by the company.</p><p>2. The object of seduction: a researcher with known expertise in the company’s target area.</p>

<p>In 2008, Henry Schuster was "the new guy" at <em>60 Minutes</em>. Everyone else at the show had already taken the big interviews, the politicians and bigwigs who would be at the center of many reports. So Schuster took a different approach: "I would rather set the table for our viewers by addressing the issue, not the candidates," Schuster told the 2009 <a href="http://www.reportingonhealth.org/fellowships/seminars/california-health… Health Journalism Fellows</a> at this evening's keynote address. "We wanted to do a health care story."<br />

<p>Most unaccompanied refugee minors arrive in the U.S. with basic health issues that need to be addressed. Many are malnourished, having nearly starved on their journey to the States - and many have untreated and/or undiagnosed illnesses. These children also come with severe psychological scars that need addressing. A minority of the refugee minors arriving in Northern California are formally diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.<br />

<p>We have a guest post today from <a href="http://www.healthjournalism.org/secondarypage-details.php?id=377">Felice Freyer</a>, veteran medical writer for the Providence Journal, member of the <a href="http://www.healthjournalism.org/">Association of Health Care Journalists</a> Board of Directors and chair of AHCJ's Right to Know Committee.

<p>For Mark Campano’s entire career as an anesthesiologist, other doctors worried that he was a bomb waiting to go off. They saw him showing up for work drowsy and agitated from weeks of caffeinated days and alcohol-soaked nights. They counseled him about his drug abuse and urged him to stop.</p>

<p>Putting together a scientific research paper should be a different process than building a <a href="http://www.fordvehicles.com/cars/taurus/?searchid=426441%7C28115800%7C2… Taurus</a> or <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xedkk1xvgeo">making a Big Mac</a>.</p> <p>For the drug companies and their ghostwriting partners, it isn’t.</p>