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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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Valley fever infects more than 13,000 people annually in Arizona and California, killing more than 100. Yet they spend less annually on public awareness.
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Seven-year-old Reba Dimeglio remembers her mother defying evacuation orders to protect her house, armed with nothing more than a green garden hose in her fight to save their home, outlined in an orange glow.
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'An invisible crisis': Toxic stress is helping to shorten life spans in many Kern County communities
In some of Kern County’s poorest, majority-white communities, people are dying four to 17 years before those in other parts of Bakersfield, Calif. Life expectancies are on par with less-developed countries like Iraq and Kazakhstan.
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Valley fever killed six residents in 2016 and infected 1,905 others, a 62 percent surge over the number infected the year prior.
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An invisible disease has been killing middle-aged white people in the San Joaquin Valley at higher rates than ever before. One doctor calls them "deaths of despair."
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The bill would bring $2 million to an already-established state fund for valley fever vaccine research and create guidelines for how local, state and federal agencies report cases.
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A Phoenix-based laboratory is capturing detailed images of the fungus that causes valley fever, hoping to better understand how it works.
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When Juan Solis shuffles out of his dark bedroom, he’s careful not to get too close to the windows because Solis has extreme light sensitivity caused by valley fever.
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Valley fever is a fungal respiratory infection that is a constant health threat in vast stretches of the San Joaquin valley.
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“Valley fever is almost certainly underreported, due to physicians and the public not being familiar with the disease,” said one infectious disease specialist. Reliable estimates of valley fever...