Photo: Connie via Flickr
A strain of an influenza virus now circulating in China remains a potential pandemic threat while many gaps remain in preparing for such an event, a group of global health experts at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) warned last month.
The virus spreading in China, called H7N9 (flu virus names reflect their protein makeup) first emerged among poultry workers in 2013 and has sickened 1,567 people and killed 615. Continue reading
The Association of Health Care Journalists has announced a new pilot fellowship program to help veteran U.S.-based journalists compare elements of the U.S. health system with those of other countries. The AHCJ International Health Study Fellowships, supported by The Commonwealth Fund, provides for training as well as international field reporting assistance.
The program for mid-career journalists is intended to give print, broadcast and online reporters an opportunity to study how one element of the U.S. health care system is handled in another country and to report on the differences. Fellows will be able to interview patients, health care providers and policymakers both in the United States and abroad.
Photo: USAID via Flickr
While the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo was declared over by the World Health Organization in late July, Peter Halfmann, University of Wisconsin Influenza Research Institute associate professor and Ebola researcher, says journalists should keep covering the story in terms of its long-term impact on survivors. Continue reading
Photo: World Bank Photo Collection via Flickr
Back in 2000, then-Surgeon General David Satcher warned in his landmark “Oral Health in America” report about the nation’s “silent epidemic” of oral disease.
Satcher described the disproportionate burden of untreated disease borne by millions of poor, minority and elderly Americans, the shortage of providers in many communities, the disconnect between dental care and the wider health care system. Continue reading
Trudy Lieberman
Veteran health care journalist Trudy Lieberman says that she’s long observed that U.S. health reporters are reluctant to reach out globally to inform their reporting.
She points out that the health stories we’re asked to report are the same ones our counterparts abroad are writing and that this “reportorial parochialism results in poor understanding of foreign health care and makes it easy to report misleading or false claims because we have no knowledge to judge their correctness or to give context so audiences can judge for themselves.” Continue reading
Photo: CDC/Prof. Frank Hadley Collins, Dir., Cntr. for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, Univ. of Notre Dame
Zika has been in the news since the beginning of the year in the United States, but health officials and journalists are still working to understand and explain the virus.
I collected some relevant resources for reporters on Jan. 28 (updated on Jan. 29) and many of those sites have been updated with the latest information.
Here is some notable coverage as well as resources that have emerged since then: Continue reading