Projects
As student athletes return to competition, their parents likely are unaware that barely a third of America's high schools with a sports program have a full-time professional athletic trainer.
A four-month Scripps Howard News Service review found that for every high school that has one or more athletic trainers regularly assigned to the training room, two other schools rely on a patchwork of coaches trained in first aid and part-time athletic trainers, nurses, emergency medical technicians or team doctors.
Despite dramatic improvements in DNA analysis and other breakthroughs in forensic science, police fail to make an arrest in more than one-third of all homicides. National clearance rates for murder and manslaughter have fallen from about 90 percent in the 1960s to below 65 percent in recent years.
More than 100 people die every day on America's killer roads. The routine act of driving has become the riskiest thing most Americans do. Yet sometimes the deadliest roads seem disarmingly safe -- a small country lane winding gently through rolling hills or a perfectly straight superhighway stretching across a vast desert landscape.
America's wild hog population is exploding and spreading across the country, more than doubling in size and range in the past 20 years. Two decades ago, somewhere between 500,000 and 2 million wild pigs roamed the United States in 17 states. Now the population numbers between 2 million and 6 million in 44 states.
As Americans struggle to take charge of their health care -- and hold down their medical costs -- a growing number are bypassing the doctor and going right to the source for diagnostic tests.
A statistical analysis of the federal government's first-ever ratings of nearly 16,000 nursing homes reveals an uneven level of quality across the nation and shows how complicated it is to find a good nursing home.
More Americans are complaining that debt collectors are using shady and possibly illegal practices to hound them for payments, a Scripps Howard investigation has found. Complaints this year to federal authorities about unscrupulous debt collectors are on pace to be more than 6 percent higher than two years ago.
A seven-month investigation into federal mortality records reveals hundreds of thousands of death certificates filed every year in the United States are wrong, meaning we don't really know what's killing Americans.
A first-of-its-kind study also found that younger, well-educated and wealthy people are more likely to be autopsied when they die. More men than women are autopsied. And blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans are more likely to be autopsied than whites.
Thousands of everyday products and materials containing radioactively tainted metals are surfacing across the United States and around the world. But because of haphazard screening, an absence of oversight, and substantial disincentives for businesses to report contamination, no one knows how many tainted goods are in circulation.
A special report by Scripps Howard News Service finds as many as one in five Americans does not have a family doctor. And this translates directly to higher rates of illness and death and higher costs.
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