The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "babies" ...
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Mining Your Business
This story investigates how certain companies get access to personal information and use it to their advantage. Growing Family, the largest baby photo company in North America seizes personal information as soon as a baby is born and sells the personal information with other corporations. Most telemarketing companies get information in a similar manner.
Tags: personal information; Growing Family; baby photo company; telemarketing; private information
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Lead Jewelry
When a one-year-old baby was diagnosed with lead-poisoning, enough to cause brain damage, WMAR investigators started to test costume jewelry kids love. Results showed that all of the tested jewelry contained lead, and some contained enough to cause illness. This investigation lead the Consumer Product Safety Commission to announce a voluntary recall of more than 150 million pieces of jewelry sold out of gumball machines. This was the single largest voluntary recall of a children's product in the history of the agency.
Tags: children; jewelry; lead-poisoning; health; poisoning; brain damage
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Too Young to Die: Infant Mortality in California
This five-part series took a closer look at infant mortality in the San Francisco area. Research found that immigrant families face infant mortality at a much higher rate and that pollution and inner-city stress seem to affect a baby's chances for survival. A look at health care also revealed a poor delivery system that doomed some infants, and a neonatal intensive care unit that saves lives daily.
Tags: infant mortality; San Francisco; pollution; stress; inner-city; immigrant; prenatal care; neonatal; premature
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War Without Victory
This series describes the facets of the war on drugs in Washington state, particularly areas that seemed too "small town" to have any drug problems. It involves a vivid description of the drug war in Snohomish County, the effects of drugs on newborn babies who carry on their mothers' addiction, how some drug offenders never spend a single day in jail, and also a study of how the legal system handles drug cases.
Tags: drug war; Washington; cocaine babies; drug-fighting agencies; Snohomish County
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Children Left Behind
The reporters set out to assess the problems children in Cleveland face. They managed to uncover hazards that even the public officials and community activists who had dedicated their careers to these issues. for example, they found that half a million Ohio Children live next door to a toxic waste site. Another finding was that nearly 1 million children live in poor housing, putting them at greater risk for fires, accidents, and environmental health hazards such as lead poisoning and asthma. They also discovered that babies born to teenage mothers are much more likely to be premature, and these babies had cost the state roughly $161 million dollars in five year. Another finding was that children of color were in most danger, they account for about a quarter of all child deaths.
Tags: toxic waste; poor housing; fires; accidents; environmental health; teenage mothers; teen pregnancy; premature babies; inner-city neighborhoods; Guatemala; African American children; child deaths; Ohio Environmental Protection Agency; Planned Parenthood; Federation for Community Planning; Ohio Department of Health; lead poisoning; poor housing; asthma; Child deaths; food banks; poverty; Rocking Horse Center; birth rate; child mortality rate; hazardous waste sites; Sherwin-Williams; Benjamin Moore; Environmental Health Watch in Cleveland; pollution; youth prison; Youth Health Empowerment Project; STD's; birth control
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Protecting Our Children
This story concerns the issue of child abuse. Missouri has very high rates of child fatalities; the reporters questioned this number and explored possible causes. The story highlights two especially tragic deaths, documents more than 150 deaths, and informs readers about the need for more prevention programs.
Tags: abuse; shaken baby syndrome; foster care; adoption
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Injured For Life
Times-Dispatch reporter Bill McKelway was finally able to penetrate the secretive Virginia Birth-related Neurological Injury Program, after years of trying to shed light on one of the most secret institutions in the state. The program was created to help pay compensation for children who suffered brain damage during birth at the hands of doctors and nurses that was "so severe that they never will be able to care for themselves." By paying out claims in secret, the intention was to keep malpractice lawsuits to a minimum and thus malpractice insurance low. But the institution was so secretive that even families involved in the program had no knowledge of each other, and the program claimed for years it was exempt from all open-records and open-meetings laws. However, McKelway was able to slowly gain information on the system, and he wrote dozens of stories on it in 2003 . The resulting reports by the Times-Dispatch revealed a program that was "woefully underfunded, failing to slow the increases in malpractice insurance, as it was designed to do, inconsistent in its application, and aimed at protecting doctors and hospitals more than helping brain-injured babies." In the wake of the reporting, the program's board meetings were made public for the first time in 15 years, and the institution is now subject to Virginia's freedom of information act.
Tags: FOIA; open records; birth; children; babies; baby; brain damage; neurological; nurse; doctor; physician; compensation; secret; malpractice; victim
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Riot baby
Ten years after the Rodney King scandal and the subsequent riots in South Central Los Angeles, reporter Daniel Voll examines the situation in that area of the Californian metropolis. He does it by depicting the lifestyle of Jelani Stewart, who was born in the same days the riots took place. Voll writes in his initial paragraph: "(...) the people are still poor, there's not enough work, and the gang violence is bad and getting worse."
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Missed Diagnosis: When a doctor makes a rare but horrible mistake, who should bear the scars?
This story is about what happens when doctors incorrectly diagnose patients. Sometimes the mistake is easy to fix, but other times it can affect someone's life forever. The story includes a family's struggle with a physician who kept insisting their child was ok. But, after getting another opinion, the baby had to have surgery.
Tags: doctors; physician; hospitals; family; families; misdiagnosis; hospitals; medical care; malpractice
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Fighting Postpartum Depression
The Chicago Tribune's two-part series about postpartum depression."Part 1: Descent into Darkness: Melanie Stokes had wanted a baby daughter for most of her life. But after child's birth, Melanie was stricken with a largely misunderstood mental illness that can be difficult to treat. It robbed her of her job and, ultimately, her will to live. Part 2: From pain, a new purpose. Jennifer Mudd Houghtaling turned to her mother for support after she fell into the grip of postpartum depression. Now her mother had joined with others to educate the public about the illness and to make sure no one else's daughter dies." According to the series, "postpartum depression, some experts say, is the most common yet most frequently undiagnosed complication of pregnancy, affecting somewhere from 10 to 20 percent of women who give birth, or almost half a million women every year."
Tags: depression; postpartum depression; baby; newborn; child; infant; mothers; illness; mom; Melanie Stokes; Jennifer Mudd Houghtaling; children; treatment; illness; misunderstood illness; sickness