What a year 2024 has been for health stories

As a health and medicine editor, it’s hard to know where to start an end-of-year newsletter about 2024. I expect the outcome of November’s election will reverberate for years to come, particularly with regard to health care policy. My own immediate and extended family has experienced the shortcomings of our country’s health care system in a very up-close and personal way this year.

I find myself falling back on the time-tested strategy of focusing on gratitude. Gratitude for my bright, insightful, good-humored colleagues. Gratitude for my own health, as I surpassed a big birthday milestone this year while also throwing myself into teacher training for heated yoga – a longtime aspiration of mine. Gratitude that we have a fantastic new health editor joining our team in January, who will undoubtedly have her work cut out for her covering the incoming Trump administration’s health care priorities. Gratitude for our scholars; it is a true gift to work so collaboratively with them and to experience the synergy that allows us to bring important stories to our readers.

Here are a handful of the stories that resonated with our readers this year:

• Nearly five years after COVID-19 turned the world inside out, the puzzle pieces surrounding long COVID are falling into place, and the picture is unsettling, explained physician scientist Ziyad Al-Aly from Washington University in St. Louis.

• Readers clearly appreciated our piece on the wonders of healthy teeth and how best to keep them that way, by clinical dentistry specialist Samer Zaky of the University of Pittsburgh.

• My colleague Vivian Lam, associate health and biomedicine editor on the science desk, edited a reader favorite on the potential mechanisms that link metabolism, aging and health, by Penn State biochemist Melanie R. McReynolds.

And for a few of our editing team’s favorites:

• Macalester College English professor Andrea Kaston Tange delved into the heartbreaking toll of infectious diseases on Victorian children, highlighting the “fragility of public health today.” Lam, who edited the story, noted to me that “we don’t need to look far in the past to remember that reality – nor do we need to stretch our imaginations that far to see it happening again in the future.”

• I’ve read and edited a lot of stories about attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, but I still learned a great deal about how the wiring differs in a brain with ADHD, by Kennesaw State University pathophysiologist Kate Harrington.

• As part of our series on the role of art in science, two stories about the particular role that art plays in the well-being of our health care workers and in our own personal well-being left me feeling hopeful and uplifted.

On that note, I feel a deep sense of gratitude to our readers, who thirst for evidence-based explainers about the complicated world we live in. It’s a true honor to be in the position I’m in.

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