Issue

Health

In Health, Pulitzer Center grantees delve into some of the world’s most pressing health issues and challenges. Featuring a wide range of topics from chronic illnesses to outbreaks and epidemics to reproductive health and public health systems, our reporting looks at the breadth of health issues found across the globe.

We also look at the global footprint of cancer, which kills more people than HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined. We examine the disproportionate burden placed on poorer countries, as well as the medical and business innovations that allow for treatment once thought too costly or too difficult to deliver.

Other projects look at mental health, including the trauma caused by conflicts like the wars in Syria and Yemen, the effects of pollution on communities, and safety and injury-related deaths, such as in our ongoing Roads Kill project.

By telling the stories of patients, caregivers, and scientists, our reporters are drawing outbreak comparisons and providing lessons for prevention. They are also taking on the challenge of communicating technical information to the lay ear, and ultimately filling the gap between the scientific and public understanding of health crises.

Health

India: Three Wives, 10 Kids Is Enough

The air crackles as a team of medical staff and crew walk across a peanut field, lugging a big generator from their boat into a village of 850 people. Near a collection of thatchroof homes, the crew sets up a projector on the dirt floor of a small bamboo structure that also serves as the community’s schoolhouse.

Boat Clinics Serve India's Isolated Villages

We load up in an SUV and make our way through the streets of Guwahati. It is raining, and much of this major city in northeastern India is flooded. Cars, men pedaling rickshaws and our SUV slowly edge their way through the water-filled streets. The water looks orange, stained from the clay that has eroded from the surrounding hills and clogged Guwahati’s drains. We are headed to meet a boat that will take a group of medical staff and us to visit a remote island on the Brahmaputra River.

The Dangers of Childbirth in Southern Mexico

Among dozens of other brightly dressed women, Eugenia Urbina has been waiting on the stairs of the main hospital in this central Chiapas town for nearly two hours. Nine months pregnant with her third child, the 24-year-old seeks prenatal care. The long wait makes her worry that when the time comes to give birth, the hospital will not have room for her.

"It happens a lot," Urbina said, and if it does, she'll have to pay more than she can afford to drive around in a taxi for up to an hour to find a clinic that can take her.