Amy Maxmen / KFF Health News
Amy Maxmen, national public health correspondent, covers efforts to prevent disease and improve well-being outside of the medical system, and the obstacles that stand in the way.Before joining KFF Health News in 2024, she was a senior reporter at Nature covering health inequities, global health, infectious diseases, and genomics. She’s also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek, National Geographic, and many other outlets. Maxmen’s work has garnered awards such as a Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting, and an AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award. She was the 2022-23 Edward R. Murrow Press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a 2020 Knight Science Journalism at MIT fellow, and the recipient of several grants from the Pulitzer Center that allowed her to report on outbreaks in Myanmar, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and elsewhere. She earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in evolutionary biology.
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Dairy and poultry workers have accounted for most cases of the bird flu in the U.S. — and preventing and detecting cases among them is key to averting a pandemic. But public health specialists say they’re struggling to reach farmworkers because many are terrified to talk with strangers or to leave home. -
Nursing aides feel abandoned as they grapple with mental and physical troubles that stem from their work during the COVID outbreak. -
Dairy workers in Texas show signs of prior, uncounted bird flu infections in a new study. Without better surveillance, researchers warn that health officials could be caught off guard if the virus gets more contagious. -
Three months into the U.S. bird flu outbreak, only 45 people have been tested and clinical labs aren't approved to detect the virus. They complain of slowness and uncertainty from the CDC and FDA.
