Laurie Garrett, medical writer for Newsday and immediate past NASW president won the 1997 George Polk Journalism Award for her series, “Crumbled Empire, Shattered Health,” which documented a range of health problems, including rampant tuberculosis and a burgeoning HIV epidemic in the former Soviet Union.
Garrett’s series, which ran in Newsday in October, demonstrated clearly “how traditional beliefs can impede medicine and science, and linked poor economic and development decisions to hundreds of thousands of deaths,: the judges said.