Erin Garcia de Jesus
Erin Garcia de Jesús covers how microbes, viruses and other health threats shape everyday life, with a focus on explaining what new research means for people rather than just what it found. She is a staff writer at Science News, where she reports across infectious disease, vaccines, antibiotic resistance, genetics and broader public health.
Microbes, vaccines and the shifting threat of infectious disease
Garcia de Jesús’ core reporting traces how microbes move through the world and how science tries to stop them. Her coverage of measles, which has no specific antiviral treatment, looks at why even promising drug candidates face practical barriers to reaching patients once cases spike. Across recent pieces, she returns to pathogens that linger in the body or environment in unexpected ways, such as work showing that a new Ebola outbreak in Guinea was most likely triggered by a person infected years earlier rather than a fresh jump from animals.
She has also reported on studies tying climate-driven heat and drought to rising antibiotic resistance in soils and water, underscoring how environmental change feeds back into human health.
Within this infectious disease lane, she tends to build stories around the scientific mechanism and then translate that into real-world stakes. When she writes about how climate change concentrates antibiotics in drying soils and selects for resistant bacteria, she stays close to experimental details - where samples came from, how resistance was measured - but always circles back to what this might mean for future infections and treatment options. Her background in microbiology shows in the way she explains concepts like viral latency, mutation rates and host–pathogen interactions in plain language while preserving nuance.
Equity, representation and who health science serves
A second thread running through her work is attention to who is included, or excluded, in health research and care.
She has profiled efforts to bring more Black participants into genetic datasets, highlighting how decades of over-reliance on people of European ancestry skews what is known about disease risk and drug response. In that reporting, she dwells not just on the statistics but on the structural reasons behind them - mistrust, access barriers, and how study design choices ripple into unequal health outcomes.
That perspective surfaces in other stories where she tracks how policy decisions, economic constraints or historic neglect shape vulnerability to disease. When she covers outbreaks or new findings in virology, she often pulls in whose communities are most affected and what researchers and public health officials are doing, or failing to do, to reach them. The result is health coverage that treats equity as a core part of the science beat, not an add-on.
Translating complex studies for different audiences
Garcia de Jesús writes both for Science News and for Science News Explores, adapting the same research base for general and younger readers.
In the magazine, she handles dense primary literature - for example, genomic analyses that link present-day Ebola cases to viruses from the 2013–2016 outbreak, or global surveys tying temperature trends to resistance genes - and unpacks the methods and caveats without jargon. She uses specific details, such as mutation counts between viral strains or how drought alters antibiotic concentrations, to ground otherwise abstract risk.
In her Science News Explores work, she retools similar themes into accessible narratives, explaining how microbes live, spread and evolve in ways that middle-school readers can follow. Even there, she keeps the scientific backbone intact, using clear metaphors and stepwise explanations instead of oversimplifying or skipping mechanisms.
That cross-audience practice gives her a distinctive style: she favors short, concrete sentences, defines terms briskly and lets scientists’ findings drive the story rather than opinion.
Background and approach
Garcia de Jesús has formal training in microbiology, including a Ph.D. focused on virus–host interactions, and additional training in science communication. She brings that lab experience into her reporting by interrogating study design, sample sizes and limitations before presenting results as news. Across her health coverage, she is most interested in the junction where basic microbiology meets public consequence: how a mutation pattern signals a hidden reservoir, how climate pressures reshape microbial communities, or how gaps in genetic data translate into blind spots in care.
Her stories are evidence-led, tightly sourced and anchored in current peer-reviewed work, but they are framed around questions non-specialists face, such as whether treatments exist, why some communities are left out of datasets, or how changing weather might influence the spread of resistant infections. That combination of microbial depth, equity awareness and explanatory clarity distinguishes her reporting from more general health news coverage.
4 more health journalists.
Aislinn Antrim
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Alex Cabrero
Alex Cabrero is an Emmy award-winning KSL TV reporter who covers where health, safety and community life meet, always focused on how decisions and events affect everyday people. He has been with KSL since 2004, bringing long experience in breaking news, public service coverage and human-centered features. His beat includes public health, emergency response, technology, local infrastructure, environment and science, framed through community well-being and resilience. He reports on issues like mental health initiatives, law enforcement staffing, environmental hazards, rescues, wildfire detection tools, land-use fights and scientific discoveries, making technical and policy details clear for a general audience. He also produces many positive, everyday-life features on families, veterans, farmers, sports and local traditions. His style is direct and conversational, often built around a central person or family whose experience carries the story across TV, digital and social platforms.
Alexandra Frost
Alexandra Frost is a freelance journalist and content marketing writer who turns expert-backed health and family guidance into clear, practical service stories. She covers consumer health, wellness, nutrition, preventive care, medical research, parenting, kids’ mental health, education, products, and lifestyle. Her reporting explains concerns such as inflammation, urinary symptoms, fiber, lung cancer screening, pain treatment, mobility, family dynamics, children’s technology use, and school readiness. She profiles clinicians and scientists, connects research to everyday decisions, and focuses on what readers should watch for, ask, or change. Frost currently writes across multiple outlets, including Good Housekeeping, Cincinnati Magazine, Wirecutter, Popular Science, Success, Healthline, Parents, Women’s Health, Reader’s Digest, Today’s Parent, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, TIME, Consumer Reports, Business Insider, and National Geographic. She also works as a freelance editor, media consultant, and content strategist.
Alexandra Pattillo
Alexandra Pattillo is a freelance journalist who pairs rigorous health and science reporting with intimate accounts of patients’ lives. She covers health, science and wellness for the BBC and other major outlets, including National Geographic, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Outside, CNN and Inverse. Her beat includes eating disorders, women’s health, perinatal mental health, brain health, youth sports, concussion, long-term Covid symptoms, attention, habits and behavioral science. She reports on emerging treatments such as psychedelic-assisted therapy for anorexia, testing evidence, safety and relapse risk. She explains complex research in plain language and examines how it shapes everyday choices. Her reporting uses in-depth interviews with patients, families, clinicians, researchers and coaches. Through the BBC’s Health Gap column, she also covers stigma, unequal access to care and gaps between lived experience and standard medical pathways.