William Heisel

I have reported on health for most of my career. My work as an investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register exposed problems with the fertility industry, the trade in human body parts and the use of illegal drugs in sports. I helped create a first-of-its-kind report card judging hospitals on a wide array of measures for a story that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. I was one of the lead reporters on a series of stories about lead in candy, a series that also was a finalist for the Pulitzer.For the Center for Health Journalism (previously known as Reporting on Health), I have written about investigative health reporting and occasionally broke news on my column, Antidote. I also was the project editor on the Just One Breath collaborative reporting series. These days, for the University of Washington, I now work as the Executive Director for Insitutue for Health Metrics and Evaluation's Client Services, a social enterprise. You can follow me on Twitter @wheisel.

Articles

Who killed this smart system to monitor health care workplace safety?

Why did the Occupational Health Safety Network meet with such an abrupt demise?

Environmental Health

Healthcare Regulation and Reform

Patient Safety and Ethics

(Photo by Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images)

Bolster your reporting with a basic grasp of the path from molecule to medicine

"How is it supposed to work?" Answer that question and you're better prepared to spot when things go wrong.

Healthcare Regulation and Reform

Community Safety

Patient Safety and Ethics

Start digging into the hidden chemicals polluting your community

"The problem was, I was being played," writes contributor Bill Heisel. "The giant petrochemical company, Arco, had the city of Butte and the state of Montana outmatched."

Environmental Health

Immigrant and Migrant Health

Patient Safety and Ethics

(Photo by Pau Barrena/AFP via Getty Images)

Don’t let science trolls drag you under the COVID-19 bridge

Disinformation is always bad for democracy, but it is especially toxic during a pandemic.

Healthcare Regulation and Reform

Community Safety

Patient Safety and Ethics

A man exposed to air pollutants near Ground Zero after Sept. 11 inhales deeply before blowing into a spirometer to check for air

Question your assumptions about racial differences in health

We’ve long given up the idea that justice is blind. We need to give up the idea that health care is blind, too....

Race and Equity

Poverty and Class

Patient Safety and Ethics

A city council meeting in Las Vegas, where every other row of seats was blocked off for social distancing.

COVID-19 is a big local story: Start documenting your community’s response

Now is the time to start building timelines and documenting how local governments are handling — or fumbling — the COVID-19 crisis.

Environmental Health

Healthcare Regulation and Reform

Is this family breathing in this runner’s plume? Or are the rules outside fundamentally different?

What I learned from my anxious experiment in masked running through Seattle

A simple jog turns into an anxious minefield in the absence of clear guidance on COVID-19 transmission.

Patient Safety and Ethics

Are medical schools pushing outdated views of race?

Health sciences are rooted in concepts that go back centuries, and some of those concepts were crafted with a racist lens, writes contributor William Heisel.

Poverty and Class

Healthcare Regulation and Reform

Patient Safety and Ethics