Emily Kaine
Emily Kaine reports on how health systems treat people at their most vulnerable, with a particular focus on gender bias, chronic illness and the gap between policy and lived experience. She covers health for The Sydney Morning Herald and moves between investigative projects, patient-led features and fast national news coverage.
Medical misogyny and structural bias in care
A defining strand of Kaine’s work is documenting medical misogyny and how it shapes women’s experiences of care. She co-reports The Sydney Morning Herald’s “medical misogyny” series, including the feature “From wandering wombs to the missing clitoris: How medical misogyny works,” which traces historic beliefs about women’s bodies through to their consequences in contemporary medicine. The series examines how women’s pain is dismissed, how female anatomy is overlooked, and how these patterns are embedded in training, research and clinical practice.
The medical misogyny project is recognised with a Walkley Award, underscoring its depth and impact. Within this work, Kaine treats women not as case studies but as primary narrators, using their accounts to show how bias plays out across specialties, conditions and life stages. She extends the reporting beyond the page by inviting people who have experienced medical misogyny to share their stories through anonymous call-outs, signalling that lived experience is a core source for her coverage rather than an afterthought.
This combination of historical context, systemic critique and direct testimony distinguishes her health reporting from more transactional coverage of single studies or press conferences. Her focus is on how enduring assumptions about women’s bodies translate into diagnostic delays, inadequate treatment and a loss of trust in the health system.
Chronic illness, workplace impacts and patient voices
Kaine frequently centres people living with chronic and life-limiting conditions, emphasising how illness intersects with work, care and policy. In her coverage of a woman whose sister died from motor neurone disease, she follows one family through the course of the illness and into a debate about what constitutes a meaningful policy “step in the right direction,” balancing grief with close attention to changes in state support and services. She uses that story to show how decisions made in health and disability systems are experienced inside a household that has already run up against their limits.
Her reporting on endometriosis in the workplace takes a similarly grounded approach. That piece looks at what it means to “call in sick” repeatedly for a condition that is both common and poorly understood, and how employees navigate stigma, pain and the risk of losing work when their symptoms flare. Kaine uses the workplace lens to highlight the economic and professional costs of a condition that has often been minimised in clinical settings, reinforcing the themes of her medical misogyny work while focusing on employment and day-to-day functioning.
Across these stories, she writes in clear, concrete detail about how chronic illness reorders lives: who shoulders unpaid care, how long it takes to reach a diagnosis, and what support families can realistically expect. Rather than treating policy as abstract, she threads legislative or funding shifts through the experiences of named individuals, making it easier to see what is at stake when health systems do, or do not, respond.
Health-driven national news and live coverage
Alongside longform and series work, Kaine contributes to live national news coverage that often has a health or public-safety dimension. Her recent bylines include “Australia news LIVE” formats, such as coverage of a fatal fire in Hong Kong and updates where Victorian health authorities warn that the worst impacts are still to come, showing her capacity to track fast-moving developments and distil official statements into clear rolling coverage.
She also reports on public events from the ground. In a New Year’s Eve piece for The Sydney Morning Herald’s social channels, she interviews people queuing near the Domain in Sydney ahead of the fireworks, capturing their expectations and concerns in short, on-camera conversations. That work highlights her ability to shift from systemic investigations to quick-turn vox pops and live hits, drawing out voices that humanise broader stories about public gatherings, risk and collective mood.
Even in these faster formats, Kaine keeps a consistent emphasis on how institutions communicate with the public and how people experience those decisions in real time. Whether she is updating a live blog on warnings from health authorities or speaking with people waiting hours for a major event, her reporting foregrounds the practical consequences of official choices, linking the health beat to everyday life rather than treating it as a specialist niche.
Taken together, Kaine’s work is defined by a through-line of accountability: for health systems that minimise women’s pain, for policies that lag behind the realities of chronic illness, and for authorities whose decisions shape public safety. She brings patient voices, especially women’s, to the centre of health reporting while still engaging closely with institutions, guidelines and data, making her coverage both empathetic and structurally focused.
4 more health journalists.
Abida Tasnim
Abida Tasnim is a health writer for The Daily Star who focuses on clear, practical guidance that helps readers recognise risks early and act before everyday illnesses turn into wider public health problems. She reports on infectious disease prevention, using measles coverage to show how outbreaks start with individual decisions and behaviours, not just hospital statistics. Her work explains what happens during an outbreak and then anchors the story in simple steps people can take, such as avoiding crowded places when symptoms appear, practising good hygiene, and seeking medical advice early. She writes direct, action‑oriented health explainers that turn clinical questions about contagion and disease burden into everyday choices. Across her beat, she stresses early recognition, timely care, and prevention as the foundations of healthier communities.
Adrián Carballo Casla
Adrián Carballo Casla stands out for turning complex cohort data on ageing into clear, food‑level advice on what older adults should eat to protect brain health and slow chronic disease. He is a researcher in nutritional epidemiology focused on ageing and chronic disease prevention and a postdoctoral researcher in geriatric epidemiology at Karolinska Institutet, writing health explainers for The Conversation. He reports on how diet quality, especially Mediterranean and Mind‑style patterns, shapes dementia risk, grey matter loss and neurocognitive ageing, and how healthy versus pro‑inflammatory diets alter multimorbidity trajectories. His articles translate findings on flavonoids, polyphenols, folate, omega‑3 fats and dietary nitrates into specific food choices and small, practical changes. Much of his coverage is anchored in his own studies on multimorbidity, high‑risk older adults and tailored dietary recommendations, often syndicated to other outlets.
Ahmed Elbediwy
Ahmed Elbediwy brings a lab-based understanding of cancer biology and clinical biochemistry to public-facing health reporting, linking drug mechanisms and molecular pathways to everyday choices about medicines and products. He writes for The Conversation on weight-loss injections, cancer overdiagnosis and anti-ageing supplements, focusing on obesity medicine, cancer signalling, screening trade-offs, skincare and supplement science. His pieces on GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro explain why some people do not respond, how gut hormones and appetite signals work, and where psychological support and nutrition fit alongside prescriptions. He co-authors explainers on cancer risk and overdiagnosis and on whether supplements can reverse ageing, separating established knowledge from emerging research. An award-winning senior lecturer at Kingston University, he favours clear, structured explainers, careful definition of key terms and evidence-based appraisal over hype.
Amanda Sheppeard
Amanda Sheppeard is a managing editor and health journalist known for long, detailed explainers that connect complex clinical research, disability policy and political narratives with the daily realities of doctors and patients. She works at The Medical Republic across editorial leadership and commercial content while reporting widely on medicine for its specialist titles. Her real beat spans autism, disability policy, autoimmune disease, infectious threats and system pressures in primary care and hospitals. She covers subjects such as autism diagnosis and the NDIS, rheumatology’s clinical shifts, weight-loss agents in rheumatoid arthritis, infection control, antimicrobial resistance and new modalities like CAR T-cell therapy and microneedles. She reports by doing the synthesis inside the story, linking trial design, molecular targets, funding rules and policy changes to concrete decisions and workflows in clinics and hospitals.