Meghan Balogh
Meghan Balogh covers health and community services with a focus on how medical institutions, public programs, and local campaigns shape care on the ground. She works as a multimedia journalist at The Kingston Whig-Standard, where her health beat spans hospital planning, surgical innovation, and community-based care. Her reporting combines clear explanations of complex clinical work with close attention to the people and organizations that deliver and organize care.
Hospital planning and health system change
Balogh reports on health system restructuring and long-term hospital planning, tracking how major capital projects move from concept to community impact. In coverage of Kingston Health Sciences Centre, she explains a proposal to build a new hospital complex on the city’s west end, presenting the chief executive’s view that the project is early in its formal planning but has been developed over many years.
Her reporting situates that plan within the broader evolution of regional health care, framing infrastructure decisions as part of an ongoing effort to modernize facilities and services rather than as isolated announcements.
Global surgery and clinical innovation
Balogh’s health beat extends to surgical innovation and global collaboration, with work that connects individual procedures and training programs to wider gaps in access to care.
She covers stories such as first-of-its-kind brain surgery performed in Kingston, documenting how local surgeons adopt advanced techniques and what those milestones mean for patients and the regional health system. Her reporting on visiting surgeons from West Africa highlights a month-long training program in Kingston that aims to bridge surgical gaps between low-resource settings and North American centres. In that coverage she brings out themes of global surgery, the challenges clinicians face in their home systems, and the goals they share with Canadian partners, showing how training exchanges tie into efforts by organizations such as Partners In Health Canada to improve surgical care internationally.
Across these pieces she treats surgical stories as both clinical and systemic, linking individual operations and skills transfer to broader questions of equity and capacity.
Community health care and local medical organizations
Balogh writes about medical organizations as anchors of community health, examining how they support residents beyond individual appointments and procedures. In coverage under the headline “Medical organization ‘bedrock’ of community health care,” she portrays one group as a foundational provider of local services and describes its role in sustaining access to care. Her work in this area focuses on governance, funding, and outreach, showing how organizations interact with health authorities and with the people who rely on them.
The tone is explanatory and grounded, with attention to both organizational leaders and the practical realities of delivering care day to day.
Public and environmental health
Balogh also reports on public health programs and environmental risks that carry health implications, connecting policy to lived experience. In a feature on rabies control, republished by Ontario Chronicle, she follows Ministry of Natural Resources staff distributing small vaccine-bait packets by vehicle, aircraft, and on foot, and notes that more than 10 million baits have been handed out since 2015 to keep rabies at bay in Ontario.
The story combines field detail with program scale, illustrating how routine, technical work underpins regional disease prevention.
In another piece, republished by LeakyLand, she covers a long-running citizens’ campaign against a leachate plan at the Richmond Landfill, describing how residents have spent decades working to hold a major waste company to account and are now responding to a new proposal. That environmental health coverage links groundwater and contamination concerns to corporate decisions and regulatory oversight, framing the issue as a community health matter rather than a purely industrial dispute.
Together, these strands show her interest in how health outcomes depend on policy, infrastructure, and environmental management as much as on clinical care.
Across her work, Balogh reports in a straightforward, factual style that reflects the institutions and communities she covers. She uses the health beat to connect hospital developments, global surgery partnerships, community organizations, and public health campaigns into a picture of how care is delivered and defended in practice.
4 more health journalists.
Alanna Smith
Alanna Smith is a national health reporter whose work links health policy and politics to real access to care, with a constant focus on health equity, infectious disease and the toxic drug crisis. She reports for The Globe and Mail on infectious diseases, hospitals and long-term care, mental health, drug policy and the pressures on health systems in Western Canada. Her stories connect big-picture decisions to patients, families, front-line workers and volunteers, showing how funding, privatization and federal standards shape public care. She has covered trauma care inequities, proposed public‑private models in Alberta, drug toxicity and overdose policy, respiratory virus surges, measles elimination, gene‑editing advances and gender‑affirming health care laws. Her work combines narrative reporting, data, legal and policy analysis, and has been recognized by national journalism and press freedom organizations.
Allan Levine
Allan Levine is a historian and author whose journalism uses the past to explain present-day issues. He writes for the Winnipeg Free Press, including the Now & Then column, which examines current events through history. His subjects include public health, disease, medical treatment, health systems, politics, social conflict, strikes, wars, antisemitism and Canadian public life. His polio reporting traces Manitoba epidemics, hospital pressures, treatment, mortality and the arrival of vaccines through archival data and medical history. He also writes about the Winnipeg General Strike and Jewish communities, including discrimination, rights and security. His work draws on books about Canadian political leaders, Jewish history and the wartime economy, including The Dollar A Year Men. He writes long-form, analytical pieces that combine dates, statistics, policy decisions and narrative storytelling to connect people and institutions with broader historical change.
Angela Amato
Angela Amato is a digital news producer with CTV News, and her coverage is distinct for linking health research and public safety concerns to legal and policy decisions that shape daily life. She reports on health, justice, politics, business, arts and culture, crime and public-interest stories. Her health work covers academic and clinical research, including studies on vaping and lung blood flow, exercise tolerance and early heart dysfunction in young adults. She also reports on motorcycle gang arrests, homicide and death investigations, Indigenous justice stories, wildfire evacuations, ambulance contracts, property taxes, labour negotiations and political advocacy rules. She explains complex findings in plain language and stays close to documents, data and expert sources. Her background includes investigative and daily newsrooms, and she has earned nominations for national journalism awards.
Apoorva Mandavilli
Apoorva Mandavilli covers the collision of infectious disease science, vaccine policy and public health agencies for The New York Times, following how research, regulation and politics shape outbreaks and access to vaccines. She reports on science and global health with a steady focus on infectious diseases and pandemics, including Covid-19, mpox, H.I.V., malaria and tuberculosis, treating them as ongoing global threats. Her work explains complex epidemiology and virology in clear narratives about risk, evidence and the consequences of scientific decisions. She repeatedly returns to vaccine policy, law and misinformation, tracing how court fights and agency disputes affect immunization schedules and public trust. She also reports on global health programs, funding cuts and inequity in care and technology. A longtime science journalist and former founding editor in chief of Spectrum, she has written widely on science and health and received major honors for medical science reporting and pandemic coverage.