Three-and-a-half-year-old Dylan was tiny, feisty and freckled with tousled blond hair. His mom brought him to the pediatric clinic because he had tried to smother his 2-week-old sister. She didn’t know what to do with him, and frankly neither did we. It was 5 p.m. and the clinic was closing.
Air pollution from industrial sources in Michigan’s Wayne County is linked to deaths and life-threatening respiratory diseases, reports Michigan journalist Natasha Dado. She argues there's an urgent need for more watchdog reporting to give voice to pollution's often-overlooked victims.
Alaska has the nation’s highest rate of people living without plumbing, and that can translate into real health problems for rural families. Despite the problem, state officials have declined to make the larger investments needed to improve conditions for the state's more remote residents.
In the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, Baltimore residents took to the streets in protest. The best media coverage showed how years of neglect have crippled West Baltimore economies, fostered distrust and violence, and put a long, healthy life entirely out of reach for many residents, Gray included.
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.
With Biomonitoring California, state health and environmental officials have hit an early milestone in their efforts to discover which industrial chemicals are making their way into the bodies of residents. Research has shown that chemical exposure can seriously disrupt cellular function over time.
The hardest part of reporting on the health implications of Central Valley rivers was not the research or content, but finding the right characters for the stories. In the end, a radio reporter discovered the best way to find the characters that brought his stories to life was on the river itself.
A recent report found big differences in how counties are handling California’s estimated 3 million uninsured. Some county safety net programs are serving very few residents, raising questions of whether such counties are adequately adapting to meet the needs of the remaining uninsured.
Radio reporter Veronica Zaragovia of KUT in Austin focused her reporting series on the rollout of the ACA in Texas, especially some of its unanticipated effects. Here she reflects on a few of the lessons she learned along the way.
"Sure, I knew hundreds of residents died in homicides or were hurt and even disabled during assaults,” said McDaniels. "But I wondered if there was something deeper going on that needed to be explored.”
