If you write any content related to public health and the health behaviors of Americans, at some point you’ve probably used data from NHANES, National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys. NHANES is the national surveillance program that’s been collecting data for decades via mobile clinics that travel across the United States collecting blood, urine, and other health data from thousands of Americans each year. NHANES enables public health experts to monitor overall health of our residents and provides important information that can be used to measure quality of our diets, nutritional status, rates of obesity and diabetes, and other public health trends.

Unfortunately, in October 2025 the entire division responsible for designing and coordinating the surveys were among more than 1000 employees at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that were laid off. Although some staff were recalled, the team responsible for the NHANES effort was not.

It’s a sad situation when the dedicated and experienced experts who ran the surveys for years are fired. Future surveys are likely in jeopardy since it will be tough for inexperienced contractors to step in. Moreover, it’s questionable whether public health is a priority for the current administration. The bottom line: if you want NHANES data, you better grab what you can NOW because the monitoring program is at risk.

Speaking of resources going away, we’ve heard from colleagues that clients are no longer accepting content found on .gov websites, even as citable sources for basic epidemiology. That means, if you want to find a reference you can cite for, say, the number of people in the United States with pancreatic cancer, you’ll have to go to The American Cancer Society or another similar organization for those data. This may not be the case with every client, but it appears to be a growing trend. We suggest you ask your client before you begin your work what their position is on using .gov content.   

With data disappearing from .gov websites and content being rewritten without reliable evidence to support the rewrites, we need to find alternatives we can cite and that our clients will accept. Enter the Brown University Pandemic Center’s Tracking Report.

We think these weekly tracking reports are great tools, with data about infectious diseases for the United States as well as other countries. The Pandemic Center tracks multiple diseases, including measles, avian influenza, monkeypox, seasonal influenza, viral hemorrhagic fevers, pertussis, COVID-19, and many more. And the data are all in one handy report, complete with tables, maps, and graphs you can use. In our experience, this resource would be acceptable for most clients.

You can view the reports online or you can subscribe to them so you never miss a weekly report. Add this resource to your tool kit.

We’ve always thought that one of the many great things about being a freelancer is when we decide it’s time to retire, we can still choose to work as much as we want. If that sounds paradoxical, it’s because it is. We both love what we do for a living—so much so that we really haven’t had to “work” for most of our careers. The thought of giving it up and walking completely away sounds like a terrible idea.

Then again, it also seems like a terrible idea to keep working as hard as we do and as hard as we have for so many years until we drop. That’s where we thought freelancing would come in and save the day. After all, we can choose to work as much or as little as we want, right? When we decide it’s time to slow down, we can pick just one or a few of our very best clients and take on only the juiciest projects. This sounded like a great idea. A nice and easy way to generate “fun money” in retirement. Also a great way to continue doing a bit of what we love to do, keeping our minds challenged and agile, and contributing to some greater good.

Over the years we’ve seen many of our friends and colleagues retire. Many cut the cord completely and moved on to their next big adventure. We applaud them! But we’ve also seen a few friends retire without really retiring. This was the approach that most interested us. That is, until we saw it in practice.

The first thing that may happen when you tell your clients you’re retiring is they go away. After all, they can’t count on you to be there anymore. They may tell you they’ll bring select projects to you, but you’ve forced them to find someone to replace you. Once they do, they’ll probably forget you. Even the greatest and most devoted clients eventually do.

The other side of the coin is that you want to stick with a client who loves you and they love you too much. They keep giving you so much work—and you, with a habit of never saying “no,” keep saying “yes.” Several of our friends have “retired” like this. (Spoiler alert, it puts the “tired” in retired.) We’ve seen friends do this for a year and longer. What might begin innocently as a project here or there quickly grows back into full-time freelancing.

This got us thinking, what if we really could just take on an occasional project from one great client, a sort-of semi-retirement. Why wouldn’t that work? It might. But we’ve also seen that it might not. And here’s why.

When we’re working full time all the time, we don’t notice the subtle changes in what we do and how we do it that happen every day. The technology we adapt to. The evolution of client preferences. The adjustments in industry best practices. We’ve seen that in some cases, all it takes is a few months for someone to go into semi-retirement before they fall far enough behind that they’re no longer the freelancer at the top of their game.

We don’t want to lose touch as our profession and our craft march on. And we know you don’t. Whatever approach you decide to take to retirement, make sure you stay relevant and up to date until you finish that final project.

We always learn new things at the annual AMWA conference. This year we learned that it’s been a weird year for almost every freelancer we talked to. Business has been slow, projects have been put in holding patterns, payments have been delayed, and formerly reliable clients have become not so reliable this year. Writers and editors have had to pivot from their usual specialty areas to other types of content they don’t usually write or edit. But when work becomes scarce, you take any kind of work you can get.

This reminds us of 2020 when SARS-CoV2 arrived and the world had to pivot. This year—and in the future—we’ll have to pivot in an effort to bring in new clients so we can maintain a somewhat steady stream of work. For example, if you work exclusively now in scientific publications, maybe you should think about taking on projects in patient education or CME. You might have to budget some dollars for your own continuing education so you can quickly move into another area if you need to.

Not only that, we’ll have to pivot in the way we do our work. With resources we once relied upon being removed or rewritten with misinformation, we’ll need to find new tools to replace them. (We talk about one such tool in On the Radar.) Fortunately, professional associations, higher education, and advocacy groups are stepping up to become trusted information sources. We just need to look for them.

As we wrote in last month’s issue of Pencil Points, everybody’s scared. The world is weird and unsettled right now and we don’t think these scary times will go away any time soon. We urge you to buckle up, accept the weirdness, be strong, and carry on. You’ve got this!