It’s time to take stock of the year that was in health and science: the meteoric rise of weight loss drugs, the approval of the first CRISPR-based therapy, the continuing effects of abortion access restrictions after the Dobbs decision, and much more.
Below is our annual list of stories that STAT staffers loved, and wish that they had written. (Also check out the jealousy list from Bloomberg Businessweek, which had the idea first.)
‘You Have to Learn to Listen’: How a Doctor Cares for Boston’s Homeless
By Tracy Kidder, New York Times Magazine
I’ve known about Jim O’Connell, a Boston doctor who’s been traveling the city’s streets for three decades, for almost that long. But Tracy Kidder rides along with him, witnessing how he wins the trust and treats the ills of people he calls “rough sleepers.” On one of O’Connell’s first days in a shelter, a nurse told him to put his stethoscope away and start soaking feet. “Foot-soaking in a homeless shelter — the biblical connotations were obvious,” Kidder writes. “But for O’Connell, what counted most were the practical lessons, the way this simple therapy reversed the usual order, placing the doctor at the foot of the people he was trying to serve.”
— Submitted by Elizabeth Cooney
Lead Legacy
By The Wall Street Journal staff
The headline of the lead story in this series smacks us in the face with a conclusion that imperils the health of everyone: “America is wrapped in miles of toxic lead cables.” The kicker: Telecom giants knew lead from their telephone cables was leaching into the soil and water for decades and haven’t done anything about it. The WSJ also went to truly extraordinary lengths to make sure the reporting was ironclad — filing requests for thousands of permit records tied to the telephone cable network, training a machine-learning algorithm to see if lead cables were in Google Street View images, even scuba diving to collect lead samples. For me, it’s a no-brainer: This series is the most important public health journalism of the year.
— Submitted by Bob Herman
9 Pandemic Narratives We’re Getting Wrong
By David Wallace-Wells, New York Times
The piece that turned me green with envy dropped at the start of 2023, as the world entered its fourth year of the Age of Covid-19. David Wallace-Wells set out to capture some of the lessons of the pandemic that we’re still struggling to come to grips with. He had me from #1: The United States never had lockdowns. (People who hated Covid mitigation strategies here throw that word around a lot. But no one in the U.S. experienced anything remotely like the lockdowns used in some countries.) The piece is studded with smart observations about how the pandemic had evolved, and how our response to it developed as time went on. For instance: As society tired of the sacrifices Covid control demanded of us, we in the U.S. came to accept a death toll that is staggeringly and indefensibly high. “We have effectively recalibrated our mitigation measures roughly around the mortality level of 2020 — as though that death toll was not an anomaly but a target.” Perfect.
This is one of the most important pieces that has been written on the Covid-19 pandemic. Historians will mine this article.
— Submitted by Helen Branswell
An epidemic of chronic illness is killing us too soon
By Joel Achenbach, Dan Keating, Laurie McGinley, Akilah Johnson and Jahi Chikwendiu, Washington Post
Reading this story, the first in a comprehensive series on America’s falling life expectancies, made me a little green. But it mostly made me red-hot angry. Piece by piece, the reporters explained how systemic failures — neglect of the public’s health, policy car-wrecks in slow motion — have led us to the epidemic of chronic illness. So often, illness is portrayed and lived as an individual experience. But taking the broader view, it’s so clear that missteps have led the U.S. to spend more on health care for worse outcomes than peer nations.
— Submitted by Isabella Cueto
California workers who cut countertops are dying of an incurable disease
By Emily Alpert Reyes and Cindy Carcamo, Los Angeles Times
This story by Emily Alpert Reyes and Cindy Carcamo describing how young, mostly Latino immigrants are being disabled by silicosis due to work cutting engineered stone countertops is one that I just can’t get out of my head. It so clearly ties our consumerist culture — who doesn’t have or want these countertops these days? — to the significant health risks faced by workers who make the products so many of us use on a daily basis. With little protections for workers, regulations that aren’t enforced, and workplaces so dusty even high-quality respirators can’t help protect lungs, some of these workers are dying in their 30s or 40s. Their September story shone light on a situation that demanded immediate action. This month, a California state board implemented emergency rules to help protect these workers.
— Submitted by Usha Lee McFarling
They Followed Doctors’ Orders. Then Their Children Were Taken Away
By Shoshana Walter, New York Times Magazine
The needs of pregnant women often go ignored by the U.S. health care system and U.S. law enforcement, and people who use drugs don’t get the friendliest reception from doctors or police, either. This story by Shoshana Walter is particularly disturbing, though, because it shows what happens when these two are layered atop one another. Specifically, it documents dozens of cases in which child protective agencies took children from mothers who’d done nothing wrong. Instead, they lost their children because they were taking common addiction medications, like buprenorphine or methadone, as prescribed by a health provider. It’s a heartbreaking story that highlights America’s bias against medication-assisted treatment (and against people in recovery, more generally). It shows that in our fight against drug deaths, we often push in precisely the wrong direction — against keeping babies with their parents, and against giving people the tools they need to achieve recovery.
— Submitted by Lev Facher
Feeling the heat: Researchers struggle to convey the complex impacts of climate warming on infectious disease
By Kai Kupferschmidt, Science
It’s clear that climate change is going to have an impact on the spread of infectious diseases, whether by shifting the habitats of animals like mosquitoes and ticks, fueling outbreaks after massive floods, or in any number of other ways. But in this story, Kupferschmidt brings some nuance into the conversation about those impacts. He notes that not every aberrant infection can be attributed to a warming world despite what people might think, citing as one example the recent locally acquired malaria cases in the continental U.S. Similarly, while we expect rising temperatures to expand the range of malaria-spreading mosquitoes, those same increases could actually put a brake on malaria transmission in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. This by no means suggests that climate change is good or is nothing to worry about, for both its health-related and other impacts. Rather, the story highlights the thorniness scientists are facing when trying to determine whether changing infectious disease patterns can be pinned on climate change as of now, and how they’re having to take into account not just fluctuating temperature, humidity, and rainfall, but evolving human and animal behavior as well. This is a great story about how scientific cause and effect are just a lot more complicated than often portrayed.
— Submitted by Andrew Joseph
Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth
By Amy Chozick, New York Times
Life After Food?
By Matthew Schneier, New York Magazine
Hear me out. I cover the pharmaceutical industry, and every year there is some uncountable number of stories of which I’m personally envious, but these two stand out in that each was a well-crafted look at something in the science business that broke containment from our little backwater and was met with, to my personal surprise, more than a little backlash from within it. Neither needs my defending, so instead I’m offering them here, months removed from their respective discourses, in hopes you might find some time to reconsider Elizabeth Holmes on her trip to the zoo and the off-label Ozempic seeker who reasoned: “Thyroid cancer’s not that bad?” Live a little.
— Submitted by Damian Garde
I Set Out to Create a Simple Map for How to Appeal Your Insurance Denial. Instead, I Found a Mind-Boggling Labyrinth.
By Cheryl Clark, ProPublica
Writing about the health care system and insurance has literally been my job for the last five months, and even I can’t find the certificate of coverage for my own insurance — the 100-ish page document that outlines exactly what my health insurance policy covers. Clark’s piece details the labyrinthine twists and turns that make a guide to navigating the system absolutely impossible to make, showing that the cruelty is the point.
After all, as the piece points out, “For an insurance company … death is cheaper than chemotherapy.”
— Submitted by Brittany Trang
Lululemon’s Founder Is Racing to Cure the Rare Disease Destroying His Muscles
By Ari Altstedter, Bloomberg Businessweek
An engrossing look at what happens when a controversial billionaire decides to spend $100 million to cure his own rare disease. Such windfall philanthropy is often the best way to do the expensive, often unprofitable work needed to transform early research into powerful treatments — just look at cystic fibrosis or spinal muscular atrophy. But, as a society, do we want our research agenda guided by the whims of the wealthy and the diseases that happen to affect them?
— Submitted by Jason Mast
Love in the Time of Sickle Cell Disease
By Krithika Varagur, Harper’s Magazine
With this year’s historic approval of the first CRISPR-based medicine, Casgevy, sickle cell has become a big area of coverage for many STAT reporters, myself included. But if I were going to recommend one story about the disease, it would be this breathtaking Harper’s feature set in Lagos, which chronicles the lives of Nigerians dating, falling in love, and starting families in the age of genetic knowledge.
For decades, the African nation has been building a successful public health program based on the pillars of widespread DNA testing, well-trained genetic counselors, and raising public awareness of how sickle cell disease is passed down. Similar programs were proposed in the ’70s in the U.S., but never gained traction due to underfunding and distrust of government and medical authorities among Black communities. In Lagos, readers are introduced to a world where a person’s sickle cell status is a central axis around which decisions about who to share a life with are more and more routinely revolving, and the generation of Nigerians grappling with how to make them.
Varagur explores this unfolding experiment in forging notions of genetic responsibility through storytelling that is at once tender and gut-wrenching. It will stay with you long after you read the last word.
— Submitted by Megan Molteni
The Post spent the past year examining U.S. life expectancy. Here’s what we found.
By Washington Post staff
The one unpleasant part of being an editor is watching a competitor pounce on an important, juicy story that you didn’t spot. It’s all the more unpleasant when said story was sitting in plain sight, waiting to be written.
So it was with awe, admiration, and a tinge of regret when the Washington Post smartly poured considerable reporting resources into trying to answer a fundamental question that we all should have asked: Why are so many Americans dying early? And why are we falling behind our global peers in life expectancy?
Many journalists have examined life expectancy over the years, but not with the sweep of the Post series. As the Post found, the culprits are not simply the crises of opioids and gun violence. It’s complicated. Their approach was meticulous and creative, including a how-could-you-not-try-it? (albeit gimmicky) calculator where readers could estimate their own life expectancy.
— Submitted by Rick Berke
A new approach to M.S. could transform treatment of other diseases
By Rivka Galchen, The New Yorker
At the end of a year of historic breakthroughs for chronic illnesses — CRISPR-based treatment for sickle cell disease, semaglutide for obesity — my envy goes to a story about the opposite: the cumulative effect of incremental improvements in the treatment of multiple sclerosis.
Rivka Galchen does a remarkable job writing about the challenges and heartbreak of a disease that was once a “dead-end,” and leaves the reader with a sense of hope, and a measure of the changes that, little by little, have made of this chronic disease a challenge, but no longer a death sentence.
And, this story shows the power of one — one clinic, one doctor — in combining knowledge and resources about a certain condition in one place when it comes to treating complex conditions, and makes a good argument that this approach could be applied to other complex diseases (the article mentions ALS, but another example that comes to mind is long Covid).
— Submitted by Annalisa Merelli