Henrietta Cook
Henrietta Cook is a senior reporter at The Age who focuses on health, bringing an investigative lens to how medical systems, workplaces and policies affect people’s lives. She has a background covering other complex public-interest beats and now uses that experience to unpack sensitive, often under-reported health issues for a general audience. Her reporting combines data, expert science and lived experience, especially on topics where stigma or institutional opacity have kept problems out of view.
Health investigations into hidden harms
Cook’s recent health coverage concentrates on problems that are serious but not always visible, such as reproductive health, patient safety and the pressures on frontline services. In one feature on miscarriages, she explores the search for answers in a field long held back by stigma, following scientists examining under-recognised causes and the impact on people who experience pregnancy loss. She draws out both the emerging research and the emotional toll, using case studies and interviews to show how gaps in understanding affect patients and their families.
Her earlier health-related reporting includes coverage of conditions in disability and community services, where unions and advocates describe systemic short staffing and the risks this creates for vulnerable clients. Across these stories she spends time on the human consequences of policy settings, highlighting how decisions at department or management level shape care on the ground. She tends to treat health not just as medicine but as a system that can fail, documenting those failures in plain language and with a focus on accountability.
Workplaces, professions and the cost of care
A recurring thread in Cook’s work is the experience of people who work in and around public services, including health and education. She has reported on industrial disputes and staffing crises in care settings, giving space to unions and frontline workers who describe burnout, unsafe workloads and the moral injury that comes with not being able to provide adequate care. This carries through in her health reporting, where she often frames problems through both patient and worker perspectives.
Her past role covering education has also involved close attention to teachers and school leaders, including pieces where she spent time inside schools to show how policy plays out in classrooms. That familiarity with workforce pressures in another people-centred sector informs her approach to health stories, where she frequently looks at how reforms, funding changes or new technologies land on the people expected to implement them. The result is health coverage that treats clinicians, carers and support staff as central characters rather than background voices.
From education and politics to public health
Cook has held senior reporting and editing roles at The Age, including a period leading education coverage and time on the state politics beat. She joined the masthead as a trainee journalist and has since covered multiple policy-heavy rounds, giving her a detailed understanding of how governments, departments and professional bodies work. That experience is evident in her health journalism, where she is comfortable navigating bureaucracies, reading policy documents and following the chain of responsibility when outcomes fall short.
Her education reporting has ranged from school funding and curriculum disputes to stories about student wellbeing and safety, often involving complex stakeholder landscapes and contested evidence. On the politics beat she has reported on state governments, leadership changes and legislative debates, sharpening her focus on how political decisions shape public services. This broader background makes her a health reporter who regularly situates medical and scientific issues within the larger machinery of policy, funding and regulation.
Narrative features grounded in people’s stories
Across beats, Cook tends to write narrative-led features rather than short transactional updates. Her stories often open with a specific person or incident and then widen out to show the systemic context, using interviews, data and expert commentary to build the bigger picture. In health, she uses this style to make complex science and policy accessible, for example by interweaving researchers’ explanations with the lived experience of people dealing with conditions like miscarriage or navigating overstretched services.
She frequently returns to themes of vulnerability, stigma and institutional responsibility, amplifying voices that are often peripheral in official accounts, such as patients, families, disability advocates and frontline workers. Whether she is reporting on health, education or politics, her work focuses on how systems treat individuals, and on the gap between policy intent and real-world outcomes.
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.