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Ryan White

Content Editor

Ryan White is content editor of CenterforHealthJournalism.org, where he oversees daily content across a range of health topics. He also is the lead for the Center’s Health Matters webinar series. Ryan has nearly two decades of experience reporting, writing and editing for newspapers in California, national magazines and online outlets. After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2003, Ryan reported widely on the environment, local politics, urban planning, affordable housing and public health issues throughout the Bay Area and Los Angeles. In the past, he’s worked on KQED’s public television program “This Week in Northern California,” served as the editor of the Alameda Sun, worked as a reporter and editor for Marinscope Community Newspapers and freelanced for a long list of outlets. He was a 2012 California Fellow, reporting on the plight of the “anchor out” community in San Francisco Bay.

Articles

The White House recently announced a set of initiatives to "bridge the word gap" between kids of different socioeconomic backgrounds. The research on which the policy is based has been around for decades, so why all the fresh attention on this topic?

Psychological abuse of kids gets far less attention that physical or sexual abuse. But a new study finds that in many ways, psychological abuse can have equally devastating effects on young lives. But it's often harder to spot, and fewer treatments specifically target it.

Cases of enterovirus D68 have quickly spread throughout the nation, filling emergency rooms and pediatric units with kids struggling to breathe. Meanwhile, doctors are still trying to understand what role the virus may be playing in cases of limb paralysis and polio-like symptoms.

Complex pediatric heart surgeries can be scary and hard to understand for families. But a former print journalist is spearheading new interactive visualizations inspired by video games to educate patients and take some of the mystery and fear out of the surgical ordeal.

Talk of the hygiene hypothesis, beneficial bacteria, and the microbiome is becoming increasingly common. But the science of how these concepts relate to allergies and other conditions is still very much in progress. And that makes reporting on these topics tricky.

Baltimore researchers spent three decades tracking nearly 800 kids from poor and middle-class backgrounds. They found little social mobility, with poor kids tending to become poor adults. The findings have sobering implications for health, which is tightly linked to socioeconomic status.