Welcome to our blog.

By Michelle Crouch Co-published with The Charlotte Ledger Measles, once considered eliminated in the U.S., is back in a big way.  Driven by declining vaccine rates and growing vaccine hesitancy, the U...

By Ashley Fredde North Carolina could face hundreds of millions of dollars in new costs — or risk losing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program entirely — if counties fail to meet new federal r...

By Jaymie Baxley North Carolina has less than a year to implement a federal rule requiring “able-bodied” Medicaid participants to prove they are working, volunteering or attending school for at least ...

By Y. Tony Yang The Conversation When federal health officials announced on Jan. 5, 2026, that they were taking six out of 17 vaccines off the childhood immunization schedule, they argued that the mov...

By Rachel Crumpler Mecklenburg County sent the second-highest number of young people into North Carolina’s detention system last year — yet it has no juvenile detention center. In 2025, 2,186 people w...

By Jennifer Allen Coastal Review The two agencies that enforce the Clean Water Act have proposed changes to the waterbodies considered jurisdictional, or under federal protection, and the deadline for...

By Jennifer Fernandez Raleigh photographer Abigail Chopel gave birth to her daughter in January 2020, just at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.  It was a scary time, she recalled. She couldn’t get h...

By Taylor Knopf Thanos first stepped into the peer cafe across from the bus station in downtown Raleigh looking for his friend — and the promise of a free coffee. What keeps him coming back months lat...

By Will Atwater In North Carolina, debates over how to regulate emerging water contaminants are moving from the lab to the policy arena — and this week, those debates could translate into binding poli...