Insights

<p>I'm honored to be a part of this year's fellows. I learned a lot during our week in Los Angeles and hope to apply that knowledge to my multimedia project. I will be looking at the obstacles that keep some in the lower-income communties of color in Tampa from developing healthy diet and exercise habits.</p>

<p>A wide disparity exists between the large number of people on transplant lists, waiting for vital organs, such as a kidney, liver, heart, lung or pancreas, and the limited availability of those organs. Why is that? And can anything be done to close the imbalance? For my project in the National Health Journalism Fellowship program, I'm delving into the subject of organ donation. My geographic focus will be the Greater Los Angeles region. Given the demographic diversity of this region, I will concentrate on organ donation among Latinos, African Americans, Asians and Native Americans.

<p>I'm in the most recent round of national health fellows, which means I just returned from a terrific week in Los Angeles. I loved my fellow fellows! Also full to the brim with new story ideas and resources.&nbsp;Now back to the&nbsp;world of&nbsp;daily journalism, where I've been&nbsp;writing about&nbsp;researchers from our local medical school who helped&nbsp;develop a microbicide that women can use to block the AIDS virus, hospital mergers and a profile on a&nbsp;trauma surgeon.&nbsp;</p>

<p>A group of 30 end-stage renal patients of Grady Memorial Hospital, in Atlanta, face death as their dialysis treatment is scheduled to be cut soon. Many of these patients are undocumented Latino immigrants who do not have insurance and do not qualify for public benefits. Their immigration status has been a barrier to find alternative care and they are running out of options.</p>

<p>I am very excited to be a part of this year's National Health Fellowship program and to be embarking on the reporting for my fellowship project. My goal is to&nbsp;take&nbsp;a look at the health of the communities that live and work along the Duwamish River in Seattle. The Duwamish is not only Seattle’s only river, and the original home of its first Native American people, it is now also an industrial waterway&nbsp;classified as one of the nation’s worst toxic waste sites and one of the few federal Superfund cleanup sites in the country to bisect a major urban area.</p>

<p>Here’s what we’re reading today:</p> <p><strong>Hawking Health Reform:</strong> &nbsp;Actor Andy Griffith, best known for Matlock and The Andy Griffith Show, has been hired by the federal government <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iL5vrJzaGazCoG8K0Qc6E… pitch seniors on the merits of health reform</a>. A national ad will air on the Weather Channel, Hallmark and other channels older folks like. (Thanks to <a href="http://gawker.com/">Gawker</a&gt; for this one).</p>

<p>Sheri Fink won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting this year for her compelling narrative about life-and-death choices made by health care providers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. While the story ran in <em>The New York Times Magazine</em>, she did her reporting while enmeshed in the nonprofit journalism world, as a <a href="http://www.kff.org/mediafellows/">Kaiser Media Fellow</a> and later as a reporter at the nonprofit newsroom <a href="http://www.propublica.org/">ProPublica</a>.</p&gt;

<p>California's Central Valley, once called "the richest agricultural region in the history of the world," is a 400-mile-long swath of some of the world's most productive agricultural land. About one-fourth of the produce consumed in the United States is grown in the Central Valley -- and nearly half of all pesticides used in this country are sprayed on crops in the region.</p>

<p>What sort of paper trail might a fraudster leave?</p> <p>Because the key to a fraudster’s scheme is the appearance of legitimacy, you need to start with the agencies that confer legitimacy on most businesses.</p> <p>Let’s start with the tax rolls. These insurance fraud cases often end up in charges that hinge on unpaid income tax. Remember Al Capone?</p> <p>Here’s one recent example from an <a href="http://www.justice.gov/tax/usaopress/2010/txdv10_Fry_Sent.pdf">FBI press release</a>:</p>

<p>It is a well-documented fact that from the late 1800s on, Native American tribes on the high plains were forced to abandon hunting and foraging as their primary means of feeding themselves. Instead, they started eating unhealthy processed ‘commodity foods’ supplied by the federal government. My project will focus on a trio of agricultural tribes on North Dakota's Fort Berthold Reservation, whose robust health lasted into the middle of the 20th century.