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Category: Health

Trump’s pick to head CDC is a Peter Thiel acolyte

Trump’s pick to head CDC is a Peter Thiel acolyte

The New Republic reports: Donald Trump has tapped Deputy Health Secretary Jim O’Neill, a market fundamentalist Silicon Valley investor and long-time associate of billionaire Peter Thiel, as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control. Taking the place of Susan Monarez, whose firing has raised alarm over the dangerous incompetence of the health department under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., O’Neill will bring to the role no medical or scientific background. But he does have a history of feverish advocacy…

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Resignation letters from CDC leaders as hundreds of Americans are still dying from Covid

Resignation letters from CDC leaders as hundreds of Americans are still dying from Covid

In late January, 2021, almost 24,000 Americans died from Covid in a single week. Less than five years later, the pandemic somehow appears to be part of the distant past. Over the last 28 days, 22 people have been killed in mass shootings across America. During the same period, there have been 672 deaths from Covid — almost three quarters of the number of Covid deaths recorded globally. For the 2024–2025 season, the CDC reported that less than 25% of…

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AI companies stand to profit from denying care to patients on Medicare

AI companies stand to profit from denying care to patients on Medicare

The New York Times reports: Like millions of older adults, Frances L. Ayres faced a choice when picking health insurance: Pay more for traditional Medicare, or opt for a plan offered by a private insurer and risk drawn-out fights over coverage. Private insurers often require a cumbersome review process that frequently results in the denial or delay of essential treatments that are readily covered by traditional Medicare. This practice, known as prior authorization, has drawn public scrutiny, which intensified after…

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How animals heal themselves

How animals heal themselves

Emory University: In 2010, Emory biologist Jaap de Roode published the discovery that monarch butterflies use medicine to cure their offspring of disease. His lab revealed how, if infected with a parasite, the female butterflies prefer to lay their eggs on a species of milkweed containing higher levels of a toxic chemical. The caterpillars eat the milkweed, ingest the toxin, and reduce the parasite load in their bodies. With that finding, de Roode joined the vanguard of scientists uncovering how…

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Ultra-processed foods, source of a chronic disease epidemic, make up the majority of children’s diets

Ultra-processed foods, source of a chronic disease epidemic, make up the majority of children’s diets

NBC News reports: Ultra-processed foods make up the bulk of what kids eat — and adults aren’t far behind, a report published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds. About 62% of kids’ and teens’ daily calories came from ultra-processed foods, the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics found, compared with 53% for adults. The report marks the first time CDC has provided estimates about how much ultra-processed foods make up Americans’ diets. Health and Human Services…

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Huge cuts to mRNA research trigger fears about future pandemics and national security

Huge cuts to mRNA research trigger fears about future pandemics and national security

The Hill reports: Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision this week to cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in mRNA vaccine funding will leave the United States unprepared for the next pandemic and other public health emergencies, public health experts warned. “I’ve tried to be objective & non-alarmist in response to current HHS actions—but quite frankly this move is going to cost lives,” President Trump’s former surgeon general, Jerome Adams, said in a post on…

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The White House office for U.S. pandemic policy has been gutted

The White House office for U.S. pandemic policy has been gutted

Nikki Romanik writes: The White House office mandated by Congress to coordinate pandemic preparedness has been gutted, leaving urgent global health security gaps. Six months into the second Trump administration, a critical piece of America’s pandemic defense infrastructure sits dormant. The Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR), created in 2022 by congressional mandate through the PREVENT Pandemics Act, has been effectively abandoned—operating without a director since Trump’s second inauguration. This institutional void emerges just as the United States…

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How letting your mind wander can make it sharper

How letting your mind wander can make it sharper

The brain needs time off, too. baranq/ Shutterstock By Anna Kenyon, University of Lancashire Every day, we’re faced with constant opportunities for stimulation. With 24/7 access to news feeds, emails and social media, many of us find ourselves scrolling endlessly, chasing our next hit of dopamine. But these habits are fuelling our stress – and our brains are begging for a break. What our brains really need is some much needed time off from concentrating. By not consciously focusing on…

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Plastic and other waste has penetrated our brains and virtually everything else on the planet

Plastic and other waste has penetrated our brains and virtually everything else on the planet

David Wallace-Wells writes: Everywhere they look, they find particles of pollution, like infinite spores in an endless contagion field. Scientists call that field the “exposome”: the sum of all external exposures encountered by each of us over a lifetime, which portion and shape our fate alongside genes and behavior. Humans are permeable creatures, and we navigate the world like cleaner fish, filtering the waste of civilization partly by absorbing it. There is plastic in salty sea foam freshly sprayed by…

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As EPA axes scientific research arm, Trump regime favors corporate profits above public health

As EPA axes scientific research arm, Trump regime favors corporate profits above public health

The New York Times reports: The Environmental Protection Agency said on Friday that it would eliminate its scientific research arm and begin firing hundreds of chemists, biologists, toxicologists and other scientists, after denying for months that it intended to do so. The move underscores how the Trump administration is forging ahead with efforts to slash the federal work force and dismantle federal agencies after the Supreme Court allowed these plans to proceed while legal challenges unfold. Government scientists have been…

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Why evangelicals turned their back on PEPFAR

Why evangelicals turned their back on PEPFAR

Peter Wehner writes: In 2006, Ambassador Mark Dybul, then the United States global AIDS coordinator, visited an orphanage run by the Daughters of Charity in Ethiopia. It was a sanctuary for more than 400 HIV-positive babies and young children found in garbage heaps, abandoned on the roadside, or left at the orphanage door. As Dybul and Michael Gerson, then a senior policy adviser to President George W. Bush, walked through the massive campus, they came to the dining hall, where…

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USAID cuts may cause over 14 million additional deaths by 2030, leading medical journal reports

USAID cuts may cause over 14 million additional deaths by 2030, leading medical journal reports

Reuters reports: Deep funding cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development and its potential dismantling could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, according to research published in The Lancet medical journal on Monday. President Donald Trump’s administration, since taking office in January, has made funding cuts to USAID and its aid programs worldwide in what the U.S. government says is part of its broader plan to remove wasteful spending. Human rights experts and advocates have…

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Mitochondria can sense bacteria and trigger your immune system to trap them – revealing new ways to treat infections and autoimmunity

Mitochondria can sense bacteria and trigger your immune system to trap them – revealing new ways to treat infections and autoimmunity

Neutrophils (yellow) eject a NET (green) to ensnare bacteria (purple). Other cells, such as red blood cells (orange), may also get trapped. CHDENK/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA By Andrew Monteith, University of Tennessee Mitochondria have primarily been known as the energy-producing components of cells. But scientists are increasingly discovering that these small organelles do much more than just power cells. They are also involved in immune functions such as controlling inflammation, regulating cell death and responding to infections. Research from my…

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Open door to discrimination: New rules allow VA doctors to refuse to treat Democrats, unmarried veterans

Open door to discrimination: New rules allow VA doctors to refuse to treat Democrats, unmarried veterans

The Guardian reports: Doctors at Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals nationwide could refuse to treat unmarried veterans and Democrats under new hospital guidelines imposed following an executive order by Donald Trump. The new rules, obtained by the Guardian, also apply to psychologists, dentists and a host of other occupations. They have already gone into effect in at least some VA medical centers. Medical staff are still required to treat veterans regardless of race, color, religion and sex, and all…

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People’s racial and ethnic identities don’t reflect their genetic ancestry

People’s racial and ethnic identities don’t reflect their genetic ancestry

Live Science reports: The racial and ethnic groups people identify with may not accurately represent their genetic backgrounds or ancestries, a new study of people in the United States suggests. This discrepancy between people’s self-reported identities and their genetics is important for scientists to acknowledge as they strive to develop medical treatments tailored to different patients, the researchers behind the study say. “This paper is very important because it clarifies at the highest resolution the relationship between genomic diversity and…

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MAHA report fabrications dismissed by White House as ‘formatting issues’

MAHA report fabrications dismissed by White House as ‘formatting issues’

USA Today reports: Citation errors and phantom research used as scientific evidence to bolster Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s landmark “Make America Healthy Again” commission report were apparently due to “formatting issues,” according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to establish a commission that was tasked with investigating chronic illnesses and childhood diseases, which culminated in the “Make Our Children Healthy Again” assessment that was published May 22. However, researchers listed…

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