Pien Huang
Pien Huang is a health reporter on the Science desk. She was NPR's first Reflect America Fellow, working with shows, desks and podcasts to bring more diverse voices to air and online.
She's a former producer for WBUR/NPR's On Point and was a 2018 Environmental Reporting Fellow with The GroundTruth Project at WCAI in Cape Cod, covering the human impact on climate change. As a freelance audio and digital reporter, Huang's stories on the environment, arts and culture have been featured on NPR, the BBC and PRI's The World.
Huang's experiences span categories and continents. She was executive producer of Data Made to Matter, a podcast from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and was also an adjunct instructor in podcasting and audio journalism at Northeastern University. She worked as a project manager for public artist Ralph Helmick to help plan and execute The Founder's Memorial in Abu Dhabi and with Stoltze Design to tell visual stories through graphic design. Huang has traveled with scientists looking for signs of environmental change in Cameroon's frogs, in Panama's plants and in the ocean water off the ice edge of Antarctica. She has a degree in environmental science and public policy from Harvard.
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The Windy City has the most lead pipes of any U.S. city. A study estimates that more than two-thirds of children there are exposed to lead in their home tap water. -
The National Institutes of Health is sunsetting its influential COVID-19 treatment guidelines, used by millions of doctors to guide care during the pandemic. -
The COVID guidelines were used by millions of doctors to guide care during the pandemic. Scientists say the development of new COVID treatments has slowed to a drip.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn, who brought mindfulness meditation into mainstream medical settings, discusses how the centering practice can help with some of today's widespread social problems. -
The agency is replacing its COVID-specific guidance with general guidance for respiratory viruses that says people should stay home when they are sick. -
The CDC is dropping its isolation guidance for COVID, instead advising around respiratory viruses in general. The change reflects the reality that severe outcomes are less frequent, says the director.
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The state has at least 10 cases of the illness to date but the state's surgeon general has not called for vaccinations or quarantining of exposed kids. This goes against science-based measures. -
A measles outbreak in a Florida elementary school flummoxes public health experts, who say the state surgeon general's response contradicts established public health measures to contain the virus.
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For years, a cancer-preventing vaccine reached vulnerable teens at rates that exceeded the baseline. Since the pandemic, researchers have seen a worrying drop in coverage among Medicaid recipients.
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The current guidance advises five days of isolation. Unnamed health officials have indicated that this guidance may soon go away, a move that troubles public health experts.
