The winners of three of this year's Pulitzer prizes were recognized for reporting on safety issues. The New York Times won awards for series on food safety and distracted driving and the Washington Post was honored for a feature on parents who accidentally leave their children in cars. Here are the winning entries.

Kids and cars
The prize for feature writing was awarded to Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post for his "haunting" story about parents, from varying walks of life, who accidentally kill their children by forgetting them in cars. The provocative title of his story framed the issue: "Fatal distraction: Forgetting a child in the backseat of a car is a horrifying mistake. Is it a crime?"

Recounting the heartbreaking stories, Weingarten wrote, "An otherwise loving and attentive parent one day gets busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine, and just ... forgets a child is in the car. It happens that way somewhere in the United States 15 to 25 times a year."

• Read more: The Safety blog on kids and cars.

Distracted driving
New York Times reporter Matt Richtel and other members of the newspaper's staff won the national reporting prize for the "Distracted driving" series of articles, in print and online, on the hazardous use of cell phones, computers and other devices while operating cars and trucks.

Collected on the Times' Web site, the series begins, "With virtually every American owning a cellphone, distracted driving has become a threat on the nation’s roads. Studies say that drivers using phones are four times as likely to cause a crash as other drivers. Yet Americans have largely ignored that research."

The series also features an interactive "game" that measures how a driver's reaction time is affected by external distractions as well as several videos.

• Read more: The Cars blog on distracted driving.

Food safety
The New York Times was also awarded the explanatory journalism prize for work by Michael Moss and other members of the staff for reporting on contaminated hamburger and other food safety issues that, in print and online, spotlighted defects in federal regulation and led to improved practices.

In one article in the series, "The burger that shattered her life," Moss tells the story of a single hamburger, the American Chef's Selection Angus Beef patty, that infected 22-year-old Stephanie Smith with E. coli in the fall of 2007 and left her paralyzed.

“I ask myself every day, ‘Why me?’ and ‘Why from a hamburger?’ ” Smith says in the article.

The day after the story was published, according to the Times, Tom Vilsak, the Agriculture Secretary, said "the story we learned about over the weekend is unacceptable and tragic," and launched a review of all department meat safety procedures.

• Read more: The Safety blog on food safety.