STAT staff share stories they wish they’d written in 2024

In 2024, STAT’s reporters brought you tons of great journalism, and elsewhere (link in case you missed it) we’ve given you a compendium of the stories you might have missed on our site.

We’ve also rounded up for you below our annual list of stories STAT staff loved and wish they’d written. (See also jealousy list at Bloomberg Businessweek, which had the idea first.)

by Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic

As health reporters, we write a lot about the burden diseases such as cystic fibrosis and sickle cell take on patients, and the long-term efforts to cure them. Rarely – partly because it happens so rarely – do we write about what happens after the cure comes. Sarah Zhang, in this brilliant profile, deftly traces what happened after a treatment came along for CF: How, for many patients, it not only added decades to life, but changed in complicated ways what it meant to live.
— Posted by Jason Mast

by Sharon Lerner, ProPublica

There have been many explosive revelations about how companies like 3M and DuPont poisoned the world with PFAS, or “forever chemicals.” Such an accountabout how attorney Rob Bilott took a farmer’s accusation that DuPont poisoned his cows and turned it into landmark litigation, turned into a 2019 Mark Ruffalo movie. But Sharon Lerner’s latest installment in the canon of what these companies knew and when they knew it is worse than anyone could have imagined: A company that keeps secrets from its employees and a woman who had been gassed for decades about what she found – that 3M’s chemicals were in the blood samples of every single person on Earth. The storytelling techniques Lerner uses had me on edge the entire time. Goosebumps, chills, some “oh my gosh”s…you have to read this one.
—Posted by Brittany Trang

by Maddie Oatman, Mother Jones

With DNA-altering drugs and protein-structure-predicting AIs, it can feel like we’re living in a sci-fi future. But when it comes to menstruation, science is still very much stuck in the past. In this fascinating, unnerving dive into how the historical stigma and cultural taboos surrounding periods have stymied efforts to learn from them, Maddie Oatman relentlessly explores menstrual fluid’s overlooked potential as a rich source of health information—for everything from cancer screening to fertility testing to understanding debilitating diseases such as endometriosis.
— Posted by Megan Molteni

by Stacy Kranitz and Kavitha Surana, ProPublica

Sometimes it’s hard to wrap our heads around exactly how a sweeping policy affects people on the ground. ProPublica has done an incredible job this year of documenting exactly how devastating abortion restrictions have been to families. The publication’s photo essay by Stacy Kranitz, with reporting by Kavitha Surana, is one of the most powerful pieces of journalism I’ve seen this year. The two followed Mayron Michelle Hollis for a year after she was denied an abortion because of a high-risk pregnancy, documenting her uphill struggle to care for her children in a state with a weak social safety net. She battles crushing financial burdens, addiction and mental health issues. Kranitz’s images capture this anxiety, as well as the moments of joy and connection that make up a life.
— Posted by Lizzy Lawrence

by Emily Alpert Reyes, Los Angeles Times

OK, I’m cheating a little bit because first installment in this series about a disease that affected Los Angeles County tabletop cutters was published in late 2023. But the follow-up this year illustrates reporter Emily Alpert Reyes’ involvement with the plight of mostly young Latino workers with an incurable disease caused by inhaling bits of silica found in engineered stone countertops. This series exposes the gut-wrenching choice many American workers face between staying healthy and making a living.
— Posted by Isabella Cueto

by Caleb Melby, Polly Mosendz and Noah Buhayar, Bloomberg

The rise of mid-level clinicians is one of the most important trends reshaping American medicine. This Bloomberg story examines the scary underbelly of this trend and raises big questions about whether some of these mid-level clinicians are qualified to care for us and our children.
— Posted by Zachary Tracer

by Gisela Salim-Payer, The Atlantic

“Nobel is one of the biggest branding exercises in history,” writes Gisela Salim-Peyer, before explaining how the Nobel Prize came about. the premium. This is the kind of sacred cow killing I love to see as an opinion editor.
— Posted by Torie Bosch

By Leslie Roberts, Science

There isn’t a journalist on the planet who has covered the painful, protracted endgame (if we’re lucky!) of the polio eradication program as diligently and smartly as Leslie Roberts, who publishes mainly in Science. Roberts got his hands on a draft copy of a report on the tragically botched “Switch,” the 2016 effort to remove a problematic component from the live virus polio vaccine. The honest draft report was an anguished post-mortem of the people behind the decision to push the change forward, despite the world not being ready. The final version, published months later while the world was fixated on the US election results, was sanitized. But the original lives on in Roberts’ reporting.
— Posted by Helen Branswell

by J. David McSwane, ProPublica

Everything from the headline – “Eat what you kill” – to the jaw-dropping details of this tale of a rogue doctor and the patients he killed reads like a Netflix thriller. But the story is frighteningly and tragically true. ProPublica’s J. David McSwane did a masterful job of telling this tormented story of a doctor, the hospital, the nurses and the town he largely controlled, and the many deaths he caused without anyone raising a concern for years, because the profits he reaped were so great. .
— Posted by Usha Lee McFarling

by Chris Hamby, New York Times

We have done some reporting on MultiPlan, a company less known to the public that operates in the shadows of the health care system. But this study reveals just how integrated it is within the health insurance industry — and deftly explains how MultiPlan’s business translates into higher costs for all workers and their companies that provide them with health coverage. The New York Times even discussed key documents unsealed in federal court to bolster its series, highlighting how MultiPlan and all the major health insurers work together to pay as little as possible for out-of-network medical claims and reap “savings ” ” that should be sent back to consumers.
— Posted by Bob Herman

by Kurzgesagt – in a nutshell

I have been a big fan of the YouTube channel “Kurzgesagt – in a nutshell” for a very long time. In my opinion, the videos they produce are the gold standard in animated explainer videos. “Vaping is too good to be true” is the epitome of Kurzgesagt – deeply researched, nuanced, beautifully illustrated and expertly animated. It’s very accessible and fun to watch, but ultimately leaves the viewer with the big important takeaways – is vaping healthier than smoking? Almost certainly. Is it dangerous? Well, we don’t know exactly how dangerous yet, but yes. This is science communication at its best.
— Posted by Alex Hogan

by Shaun Lintern, The Sunday Times

London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital is known as one of the great children’s hospitals in the world. It made it even more shocking to read this Sunday Times story about alleged inappropriate care by an orthopedic surgeon called Yaser Jabbar, who worked on the Lower Limb Reconstruction Service. It describes a child who has to have a leg amputated due to complications after an operation, and other children who are left with legs of different lengths. The story also described a damning report by the Royal College of Surgeons about Jabbar, who left GOSH last year, and problems at GOSH widely. Finally, news broke of a GOSH review of hundreds of patients who had been cared for by Jabbar; of the 37 cases that had been reviewed at that time, 22 were found to have suffered some degree of harm.
— Posted by Andrew Joseph