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

November 25, 2007 | Palm Beach Post

Epidemic Highlights Disparities

Antigone Barton, Stephen Sapienza

It was 1982 when Dr. Jean Malecki examined a dying 9-month-old baby and made the first pediatric AIDS diagnosis in Palm Beach County.

The parents, who had arrived recently from the Caribbean, were sick, too.

"Within six months, the child had died," Malecki said. "The whole family got wiped out by the disease."

Malecki states this flatly because in the past 25 years, the Palm Beach County health director says, she has seen that flinching from the truth accomplishes nothing.

November 22, 2007 | PBS Foreign Exchange

House Call in Hell

Antigone Barton, Stephen Sapienza

This video takes you inside the walls of one of the worst prisons in the Western hemisphere. Overcrowding, poor sanitation, and a general lack of funding in Haiti's National Penitentiary have led to exorbitant HIV and Tuberculosis rates. Reporter Antigone Barton and videographer Stephen Sapienza take a first-hand look at these conditions and an American doctor working to correct them. After this video was taken, USAID authorized $200,000 in emergency funding for health and sanitation improvements.

Aired on Foreign Exchange November 2007.

November 18, 2007 | Palm Beach Post

Haiti Fights Back Against HIV

Antigone Barton, PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti

These are good times in this embattled capital.

Kidnappings are down and trash is picked up.

Brightly-painted trucks that serve as buses drive through bustling streets where vendors supply cheap wares and workers repair ancient machines with obsolete tools.

United Nations trucks patrol the streets, too, but after years of outside intervention, the people of this impoverished republic are running their own government.