Richard Knox
Since he joined NPR in 2000, Knox has covered a broad range of issues and events in public health, medicine, and science. His reports can be heard on NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, Talk of the Nation, and newscasts.
Among other things, Knox's NPR reports have examined the impact of HIV/AIDS in Africa, North America, and the Caribbean; anthrax terrorism; smallpox and other bioterrorism preparedness issues; the rising cost of medical care; early detection of lung cancer; community caregiving; music and the brain; and the SARS epidemic.
Before joining NPR, Knox covered medicine and health for The Boston Globe. His award-winning 1995 articles on medical errors are considered landmarks in the national movement to prevent medical mistakes. Knox is a graduate of the University of Illinois and Columbia University. He has held yearlong fellowships at Stanford and Harvard Universities, and is the author of a 1993 book on Germany's health care system.
He and his wife Jean, an editor, live in Boston. They have two daughters.
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FDA officials say the New England Compounding Center's own environmental monitoring showed multiple instances of contamination going back nearly nine months before an outbreak of meningitis linked to one the company's drugs. The company's knowledge of contamination problems and its failure to act are among the most damning findings to come out investigations of the pharmacy. -
Public health officials are trying to strike a balance between alerting, diagnosing and treating patients who might be at risk of fungal infections — and not overdiagnosing and overtreating those who aren't at risk. The caution is warranted. This type of infection can smolder for weeks before exploding into meningitis or causing massive strokes. -
The mold is so rare as a cause of human illness that nobody knows its incubation period. That makes it hard to predict when the outbreak will be over. -
Adding a 12-year-old antibiotic to the regimen of patients with highly drug-resistant tuberculosis cured nearly 90 percent of patients in a study involving about 40 people in South Korea. The study, though small, suggests that the battle against the ancient scourge is far from lost. -
Little is known about how to diagnose and treat this kind of meningitis, which was caused by a tainted drug. And the investigation into how the drug contamination occurred is revealing a spectacular failure of consumer protection.
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A Meningitis outbreak occurred after a steroid drug commonly injected into people's spines to relieve back pain was apparently contaminated by an ordinary fungus. The problem shines a light on little-known and lightly regulated companies called compounding pharmacies.
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The government has named 75 medical facilities that received a potentially contaminated drug suspected of infecting 47 patients with meningitis nationwide.
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At first it seemed likely that the two known cases of illness from the new cousin-of-SARS virus may have been exposed in or near the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah. But now it's pretty certain that a 49-year-old Qatari man who had traveled to Jeddah last month didn't pick up the virus there after all.
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Public health experts have gotten better at detecting new diseases and figuring out their cause since the SARS outbreak nearly 10 years ago. Advances in communications and genetics mean information about new microbes is more accessible.
