On Oct. 2, Kaitlyn Ridel had a story on the front page of USA Today in which she wrote, "Thousands of U.S. children with dangerous amounts of lead in their blood may go unassisted this year because local health departments can't afford to monitor them, a survey of major cities by USA TODAY shows."
Tough stuff, and it was done the hard way–by surveying 21 local health departments to ask whether they had the resources to test for lead in accordance with new guidelines from the CDC that raised the number of children who need testing to 450,000 from 77,000.
If Ridel's name isn't familiar, it might be because she is a student at the University of Dayton and was an investigative-reporting intern at the paper when she wrote the story. "It was a humbling experience," she told Barbara Feder Ostrov at Reporting on Health. Ridel got on to the story by connecting two developments: The first was that the CDC changed its threshhold at which children under 6 are considered at risk of lead poisoning from 10 micrograms per deciliter to five. The second was that Congress gutted the CDC's lead poisoning prevention budget for local health departments, slashing it from $29 million in fiscal year 2011 to $2 million in 2012.
While the transformation of the news business continues to undergo revolutionary change, it's nice to see that picking up the telephone and making an unreasonable number of calls can still produce a front-page story. And that a young reporter understands that.
Congrats to Ridel.
-Paul Raeburn
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