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Harold Pierce
Learning & Development Specialist
Harold serves as the Learning & Development Specialist at USC Center for Health Journalism.
Before joining the Center, Harold was an award-winning journalist reporting throughout Southern California. He started his professional career at the Santa Maria Times covering the Danish tourist town of Solvang before heading to The Bakersfield Californian. While there, he covered education and health. He reported extensively for The Center for Health Journalism's "Reporting on Health Collaborative," which brought together journalists from across two states to cover Valley fever, a little-known respiratory disease. The project led to greater awareness, legislative reforms and funding for research. He is also a former fellow, reporting on life expectancies and Adverse Childhood Experiences throughout the southern San Joaquin Valley. In 2018, Harold left The Californian to become the communication manager at Adventist Health, where he served on the leadership team opening a 25-bed critical access hospital in east Kern County.
He graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in literature and studied journalism at Santa Ana College, where he worked for the award-winning el Don newspaper staff. He lives in Southern California with his rescue dog, a Queensland Heeler, named Frisbee.
Articles
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Topics
Due to medical community opposition, California Assemblyman Vince Fong withdrew a bill late last month that would have mandated doctors to run specific lab testing under suspect valley fever.
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Assemblymen Vince Fong and Rudy Salas of Bakersfield proposed a $7 million budget proposal that, if adopted, would be the most money ever allocated to study and awareness of the disease in California.
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Just 48 people have signed up across California and Arizona for a new clinical trial of Fluconazole, an antifungal drug used to treat valley fever. That's far fewer than officials had expected.
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Bakersfield lawmakers requested $3 million in the state budget last week to research treatments and conduct outreach for valley fever.
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California Assemblyman Rudy Salas' introduced a new package of four bills on Monday that aim to boost valley fever awareness and treatment.
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Advocates for valley fever research give California Assemblyman Rudy Salas an “A” for effort for the "most robust" legislative effort to address the disease in state history.
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Assemblyman Vince Fong, R-Bakersfield, will introduce two bills Wednesday aimed at combating valley fever, the orphan disease which infected Californians at epidemic levels last year.
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Researchers say a new test for valley fever can return nearly 100 percent accurate results in under two hours. It’s a breakthrough for the orphan disease.
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For a reporter who found signs of hopelessness in one Kern County community after another, childhood trauma turned out to be the unifying theme, handed down from one generation to the next.
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The workers fell ill earlier this year while working on a solar panel project in Monterey County after six employers allowed serious lapses in training and safety precautions.