Community & Public Health

After New York State started publicly reporting mortality rates for cardiac surgery, some poor performing surgeons stopped practicing or left the state and mortality rates dropped. What do journalists and policy thinkers need to know about similar efforts nationwide?

Keriana Carll cries in pain nearly every day. Her mouth hurts. The 4-year-old has such severe dental disease that she had to get her front tooth pulled. But no dentist in Florida's Sarasota or Manatee County was willing to treat her.

"Finding families touched by the death of a child was hard," writes Sammy Caiola of the Sacramento Bee. "And convincing them to talk to me was even harder."

Zika has become the biggest health story of the summer, and the volume of coverage reflects that. But some of the most interesting reporting has started to focus on the longer-term effects of the virus on children.

Are California hospitals doing a better job of preventing serious mistakes in the wake of a state program that issues high-profile penalties for such errors? One reporter finds reasons for doubt in the data.

A first-of-its-kind CDC report on arthritis gained hardly any notice in the media recently. Given the prevalence of the disease in the U.S., why aren’t health reporters devoting more coverage to this issue?

Anthony Marcus had heard the same story about underage sex workers that most of us know — that they are brutalized by violent pimps and sold into sex slavery. But is that story correct?

A year after Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, a reporter returned to the neighborhood and spent months talking with families about how they cope with toxic levels of stress and violence.

Looking through health statistics for the United States, there’s an area that almost always shows up in red: Alabama’s Black Belt. A stretch of fertile lands across the southern half of the state, it was one of the most brutal and wealthy parts of the country during the slavery era....