The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. Add to that more than 3,000 tipsheets from our national conferences on how to cover specific beats or do specific stories and you have a resource that no reporter or editor should be without. These stories and tipsheets are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Logged-in members can view the tipsheets free online:
Search results for "public health and safety" ...
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Investigating Public Health Agencies & Programs
The author discusses how to investigate public health agencies. She includes advice for reporting in crisis situations, as well as story ideas for enterprise pieces about the agencies. The tipsheet includes sources for covering notifiable diseases in your area, bioterrorism funds, lab safety, and lab animal welfare.
Tags: public health; local government; state government; CDC; MMWR; story ideas; beat reporting
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Data on Addiction
The main source of federal data on drug use is the Substance Abuse and mental Health Services Administration. Suo discusses some of the data sets that are available from the organization's website, as well as the pros and cons of each one.
Tags: drugs; public health; public safety; narcotics; data analysis; computer-assisted reporting
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Following the Money after a Disaster
Buettner walks us through how story about the federal money given to New York after 9/11. He discusses the agencies he investigated and the sorts of data he analyzed to find out where the money was going. The data he discusses includes contract data, grant data, SBA Disaster Loans, and FEMA grants. Buettner discusses how he found and used each type of data. At the end of the tipsheet, he shares the results of his investigation.
Tags: September 11; federal government; state government; relief efforts; emergency services; public health; public safety; housing and urban development; HUD
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How Safe is Your Food? How to report on food safety and restaurant inspections
This tipsheet is a good guide to investigating food safety. The authors begin by offering tips like "get multiple years of data." Each tip is accompanied by a detailed explanation backed up with the authors' own experience. Then, the tipsheet ends with advice about building a database of restaurant inspections. The authors share their own experience doing this and offer a lot of suggestions to make the database efficient and effective.
Tags: restaurant; food poisoning; city government; food inspectors; FDA; state government; public health and safety
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"Using data to uncover workplace dangers and abuses"
This tipsheet provides tips on how to find data from agencies, and what to do if agencies won't give you data. It also includes information about analyzing data sets. The tipsheet also includes a list of important data sources, with links to their websites and descriptions of the data they might have. Additionally, this tipsheet has resources from the U.S. Department of Labor and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health websites that includes a list of their available statistics and data sets.
Tags: U.S. Department of Labor; Injuries; Illnesses; Fatalities; record keeping; NIOSH; respirators and personal protective equipment; agency; workers' compensation; Centers for Disease Control; CDC; OSHA; licensing agencies; Health departments; environmental health standards; institutional health standards; public health hazards
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Ideas and resources for investigative stories
Joan Claybrook of Public Citizen offers a primer to 7 separate issues that affect the public; medical malpractice, health, electricity deregulation, auto safety, food, global trade, and campaign finance. Medical malpractice, deregulation, auto safety, and campaign finance each have additional information on the subjects in this comprehensive tipsheet.
Tags: medical malpractice; health; doctors; hospitals; prescriptions; enron; deregulation; ford; firestone; tires; lobbying; nonprofit; campaign finance; 527; NAFTA; data; irradiation
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Tipsheet No: 78
Forty-three page bibliography is a partial listing of testimony, reports, hearings, comments and articles on drugs, food, health care, medical devices and product safety available from the Public Citizen Health Research Group.
Tags: None
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Tipsheet No: 36
Resources for investigating the workplace, including organizations, publications, computer data bases, unions and universities with occupational health and safety programs. Three pages.
Tags: None
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Starting a workplace safety project
Outlines how to proceed in a workplace safety project; includes source list, background on Occupational Safety and Health Administration, computer vs. non-computer reporting and public records. Also includes whom to write for the OSHA database, institutions that have the OSHA tapes and can perform analysis, sample federal inspection list, reported occupational injury incidence rates by industry. Casey and Carollo's IRE award winning series on OSHA is Morgue File #8223.
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Tipsheet No: 17
List of sources, including regulators, consumer groups, publications, unions. Includes the table of contents and some relevant pages from The Capital Source: The Who's Who, What, Where in Washington.
Tags: Nutrition; health; food safety