Gabrielle Emanuel
Gabrielle Emanuel covers Global Health and Development for NPR's Science Desk.
Emanuel loves taking a complex issue and finding the person or story that can make it relatable to a general audience. She reports on infectious diseases (such as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis), non-infections diseases (such as cancer and heart disease) and neglected diseases (such as schistosomiasis and river blindness) — as well as how people access health care. She keeps tabs on many of the big global health priorities, including improving maternal and child health.
She's covered everything from Ebola outbreaks, to access to eye glasses, to counterfeit medications.
Emanuel joined NPR's Science Desk in 2024. Before that, she covered health at WBUR in Boston. She started her career in journalism at NPR as a Kroc Fellow where she covered education — and reported a podcast episode with Planet Money on the bartering economy where zoos and aquariums swap animals. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times and on This American Life.
Emanuel has won multiple awards including National Edward R. Murrow Awards — one for education coverage and one for reporting on the Massachusetts family shelter system — and the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi Award for Feature Reporting for a story uncovering the Reverse Freedom Rides of the 1960s.
Emanuel got her BA in history from Dartmouth College and completed her doctorate in policy at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. When she finds a free moment, she loves woodworking and delving into how best to bring American history to life for children.
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In some towns in India, a visitor to the post office who's squinting at fine print might be asked: Do you want an eye test? -
In some towns in India, people working for a non profit approach people who appear to have trouble reading small print to get them hooked up with glasses.
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The staff of a wildlife preserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo are trying desperately to keep their gorillas from exposure to Ebola. Gorillas can get it and almost all of them die from it.
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Three brothers say their mother and father died after losing access to their HIV medications. Now the boys are figuring out how to navigate life. -
In Pakistan, taxes on menstrual products can add up. Activists have long worked to change this. Now a new budget wipes out the 18% sales tax. But questions remain about the impact on prices. -
HIV/AIDS medications are harder to get due to aid cuts, raising concerns of a return to child-headed households that were prevalent before the U.S. tackled the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
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The Ebola outbreak is taking place in a region that has been through decades of deadly conflict. That's affecting how responders are doing their work, from testing to treating patients.
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In Virunga National Park, rangers are on the front lines — playing a critical role to contain the surging virus while coping with an upsurge in conflict-related violence. -
A big challenge in fighting this Ebola outbreak is the spread of rumors and falsehoods on social media. Aid workers and officials are launching efforts to combat this misinformation.
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In echoes of past outbreaks, community members are attacking clinics, distrusting doctors and following burial traditions that could lead to more cases of Ebola.
