Category Archives: Children

Investigator, researcher share tips on how to cover suicide

Leave a reply
Valarie Basheda

About Valarie Basheda

Valarie Basheda, director of news and special projects at WebMD, oversees WebMD’s original news, special reports, and blogs. Before joining WebMD, she worked as an editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Before that, she worked at the American Journalism Review, the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News.

Photo: Sonya CollinsTrebor Randle, special agent in charge of the Child Fatality Review Unit of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, shares Georgia-specific suicide rates and demographics.

Death by suicide is on the rise and is the second-leading cause of death for people ages 10 to 39. In some cases, especially with children younger than 18, the media may shy away from covering these tragic deaths.

That’s not the correct approach, says Trebor Randle, special agent in charge with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Randle works in the Child Fatality Review Unit of the GBI. She investigates every case when a child dies by suicide under the age of 18. Continue reading →

Newly merged infectious disease organization offers journalists’ resources

Leave a reply
Bara Vaida

About Bara Vaida

Bara Vaida (@barav) is AHCJ's core topic leader on infectious diseases. An independent journalist, she has written extensively about health policy and infectious diseases. Her work has appeared in outlets that include the National Journal, Agence France-Presse, Bloomberg News, McClatchy News Service, MSNBC, NPR, Politico and The Washington Post.

Photo: CDCAedes aegypti

More than five million children around the world die before the age of five from infectious diseases like pneumonia, malaria and measles, and scientist John Aitchison wants to talk to journalists about his work to reverse that trend.

“We can help journalists with the significance or size of an issue and provide understanding of why a disease is hard to cure or treat,” says Aitchison, whose organization, the Center for Infectious Disease Research (CIDR) announced plans in July 2018 to merge with the Seattle Children’s Research Institute. Continue reading →

United effort helps two rural Oklahoma communities reduce childhood caries

Leave a reply
Mary Otto

About Mary Otto

Mary Otto, a Washington, D.C.-based freelancer, is AHCJ's topic leader on oral health and the author of "Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America." She can be reached at mary@healthjournalism.org.

Photo: Carol Von Canon via Flickr

America’s tribal communities have long suffered from an abundance of oral disease problems and a shortage of dentists.

Research has shown that Native American and Alaska Native preschoolers experience tooth decay at more than four times the rate of white children. Continue reading →

Webcast will address employers’ efforts to reform labor and delivery services

Leave a reply
Joseph Burns

About Joseph Burns

Joseph Burns (@jburns18), a Massachusetts-based independent journalist, is AHCJ’s topic leader on health insurance. He welcomes questions and suggestions on insurance resources and tip sheets at joseph@healthjournalism.org.

In an important series last year, ProPublica partnered with NPR to report on maternal deaths in the United States. In the ”Lost Mothers, Maternal Care and Preventable Death” series, ProPublica reporter Nina Martin, engagement reporter Adriana Gallardo and NPR special correspondent Renee Montagne, reported that for the past two decades maternal mortality has declined in other affluent countries while the rate of maternal deaths has been rising in the United States. Here’s a link to NPR’s companion site, “Lost Mothers: Maternal Mortality in the United States.”

Today, 700 to 900 American women die during pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum, the highest rate in the developed world, they reported. Continue reading →

Young women falling short of exercise recommendations

Leave a reply
Cassie Chew

About Cassie Chew

Based in Washington, D.C., Chew covers health care policy for a variety of media outlets. She has been published in Stat News, Politico, Provider Magazine, Modern Healthcare and BloombergBNA.

Photo: Peter Dutton via Flickr

Many young women in recent weeks have walked across a stage in cap and gown to accept their hard-earned high school diplomas. But recent research says the transition into adulthood comes with quickly forgetting lessons from their physical education classes.

Recent data analysis of findings from a long-running health study finds that women in their late teens and 20s are less physically active than their male counterparts, failing to meet minimum recommendations for exercise. Continue reading →