Amy Maxmen KFF Health News

Amy Maxmen KFF Health News

National Reporter, KFF Health News

As a public health correspondent at KFF Health News, Amy Maxmen is Healthbeat’s national reporter. She has worked as 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. Amy’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. She lives in New York City.

Laborers have suffered in extreme temperatures triggered by climate change. Deaths aren’t inevitable, researchers say: Employers can save lives by providing ample water and breaks.

Cases have more than doubled in the United States within a few weeks, but researchers can’t determine why the spike is happening because surveillance for human infections has been patchy.

Misinformation coupled with a parental rights movement that shifts decision-making away from public health expertise has contributed to the lowest childhood vaccine rates in a decade.

A new study lends weight to fears that more livestock workers have gotten the bird flu than has been reported.

Farmworkers face some of the most intense exposures to the bird flu virus, but advocates say many of them would lack resources to fall back on if they became ill.

The World Health Organization has issued a report that transforms how the world understands respiratory infections like covid-19, influenza, and measles.

Finland is offering farmworkers bird flu shots. Some experts say the U.S. should too.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says a glitch in its bird flu test hasn’t harmed the agency’s outbreak response. But it has ignited scrutiny of its go-it-alone approach in testing for emerging pathogens.

Why did it take so long to recognize the virus on high-tech farms in the world’s richest country? Because even though H5N1 has circulated for nearly three decades, its arrival in dairy cattle was most unexpected.

Six people who work at a poultry farm in northeastern Colorado have tested positive for the bird flu.