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Category: Health

UnitedHealth, one of America’s biggest companies, is imploding

UnitedHealth, one of America’s biggest companies, is imploding

CNN reports: UnitedHealth Group, one of America’s biggest corporations and a member of the exclusive Dow Jones Industrial Average, is suddenly unraveling. The crisis engulfing UnitedHealth hit a crescendo this week when CEO Andrew Witty stepped down abruptly for “personal reasons.” UnitedHealth also swiftly abandoned its financial guidance, blaming skyrocketing medical costs. And then The Wall Street Journal dropped the hammer, revealing that UnitedHealth is under federal criminal investigation for possible Medicare fraud. The developments have stunned investors, triggering a…

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The risks from chemicals in our food may be even worse than Kennedy suggests

The risks from chemicals in our food may be even worse than Kennedy suggests

Julia Belluz writes: The health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., believes toxic chemicals in food are behind the U.S. explosion in rates of obesity and a range of other chronic illnesses. “A facade of normalcy has masked this meteoric rise in chronic disease, and we can no longer ignore it,” he said recently. He intends to rid the U.S. food supply of nine chemicals — all petroleum-based, synthetic food dyes — in as soon as 18 months. Mr. Kennedy has…

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Bill Gates accuses Elon Musk of ‘killing the world’s poorest children’

Bill Gates accuses Elon Musk of ‘killing the world’s poorest children’

The Guardian reports: Bill Gates announced plans on Thursday to shutter the Gates Foundation in 2045 and also strongly criticized Elon Musk for slashing funding to the US Agency for International Development (USAID), accusing the Tesla CEO of “killing the world’s poorest children” in new interviews. In an interview with the Financial Times published on Thursday, Gates condemned the sudden funding cuts to USAID by Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), saying the cuts had led to life-saving food…

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Every American child is born pre-polluted with synthetic chemicals

Every American child is born pre-polluted with synthetic chemicals

Mariah Blake writes: During the crucial early weeks of pregnancy, when fetal cells knit themselves into a brain and organs and fingers and lips, a steady flow of man-made chemicals pulses through the umbilical cord. Scientists once believed that the placenta filtered out most of these pollutants, but now they know that is not the case. Along with nutrients and oxygen, numerous synthetic substances travel to the womb, permeating the fetus’s blood and tissues. This is why, from their very…

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Orangutan healed his own wound using a known medicinal plant

Orangutan healed his own wound using a known medicinal plant

Smithsonian magazine reports: In June 2022, a team of researchers observed a behavior never before witnessed in the animal world: A Sumatran orangutan named Rakus self-treated an injury using a medicinal plant. At Gunung Leuser National Park, a rainforest reserve on the western Indonesian island of Sumatra, scientists heard from the treetops a series of “long calls,” a behavior that usually preempts assertions of male dominance or aggression. The next day, they saw Rakus with an open wound on his…

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Efficiency? RFK Jr says 20% of DOGE’s health agency job cuts were mistakes

Efficiency? RFK Jr says 20% of DOGE’s health agency job cuts were mistakes

The Guardian report: Around a fifth of the 10,000 jobs cut from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) were done in error and will need to be corrected, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has admitted. Mass layoffs from the health department began this week amid a push by Donald Trump’s administration to shrink the size of the federal government workforce. Union representatives were told around 10,000 people were to lose their jobs ahead of…

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After RFK Jr.’s ‘radical transparency’ pledge, HHS shutters much of its communications, FOIA operations

After RFK Jr.’s ‘radical transparency’ pledge, HHS shutters much of its communications, FOIA operations

STAT reports: The Department of Health and Human Services made major cuts to teams across its agencies that handle communications, media relations, and Freedom of Information Act requests as part of mass layoffs Tuesday, a move that workers say will impair the department’s ability to relay critical health information to the public and run counter to secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vow to promote “radical transparency.” At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the majority of the media relations…

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Finland is again ranked the happiest country in the world as the U.S. falls to its lowest-ever position

Finland is again ranked the happiest country in the world as the U.S. falls to its lowest-ever position

The Associated Press reports: Finland is the happiest country in the world for the eighth year in a row, according to the World Happiness Report 2025 published Thursday. Other Nordic countries are also once again at the top of the happiness rankings in the annual report published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. Besides Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden remain the top four and in the same order. Aino Virolainen, a digital commerce director, has lived…

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In the name of efficiency, Kennedy backs off ‘radical transparency’ in favor of secrecy

In the name of efficiency, Kennedy backs off ‘radical transparency’ in favor of secrecy

CNN reports: The US Department of Health and Human Services has reversed an obscure requirement called the Richardson Waiver, which requires a period of notice and an opportunity for public comment on a wide range of decisions related to “agency management or personnel or to public property, loans, grants, benefits, or contracts.” The Richardson Waiver has been in force at the department since 1971 and imposes notice-and-comment periods above and beyond those required under something called the Administrative Procedures Act….

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The Trump administration said these aid programs saved lives. It canceled them anyway

The Trump administration said these aid programs saved lives. It canceled them anyway

By Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy This story was originally published by ProPublica After the Trump administration moved to freeze nearly $60 billion in foreign aid in January, officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio repeatedly assured Americans that lifesaving operations would continue. “We don’t want to see anybody die,” he told reporters in early February. Aid organizations the world over scrambled to prove their work saved lives, seeking permission from the State Department and the U.S. Agency for…

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Project 2025 is gutting medical funding that helped Russell Vought’s own daughter

Project 2025 is gutting medical funding that helped Russell Vought’s own daughter

Mother Jones reports: The National Institutes of Health, the federal government’s leading medical research agency, came under attack by Project 2025 well before its architect, Russell Vought, was confirmed to Donald Trump’s second-term cabinet as head of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought’s pet project—the playbook for the Trump presidency—asserts that “funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders” and encourages “more modest federal funding through” NIH. Last Friday,…

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Trump’s gutting of foreign aid is a threat to global health

Trump’s gutting of foreign aid is a threat to global health

Jeremy Youde writes: In its chaotic first few weeks, one of the new Trump administration’s many targets has been global health. With a few strokes of a Sharpie, President Donald Trump halted nearly all U.S. foreign assistance programs, including those for global health, and started the process of pulling the United States out of the World Health Organization. Trump made a range of false claims about foreign aid to support his moves, including spreading the lie that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) sent…

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What Amazonian lives tell us about heart health and longevity

What Amazonian lives tell us about heart health and longevity

Ben Daitz writes: The Horus Group, named after the Egyptian god of healing, is an international team of cardiologists, archaeologists and radiologists who have studied more than 200 mummies in Egypt, Peru, the Aleutian Islands and Italy with computer tomography (CT) scans and genetic analyses. They wanted to see if atherosclerosis, one of the leading causes of death in the world, is a disease of modernity, our high stress, cholesterol-laden lifestyle, or if it had been there all along. Are…

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Trump eliminates help for Black and Latino communities hit harder by pollution

Trump eliminates help for Black and Latino communities hit harder by pollution

The Associated Press reports: For four years, the Environmental Protection Agency made environmental justice one of its biggest priorities, working to improve health conditions in heavily-polluted communities often made up largely of Black, Latino and low-income Americans. Now that short-lived era is over. President Donald Trump in his first week eliminated a team of White House advisors whose job it was to ensure the entire federal government helped communities located near heavy industry, ports and roadways. Trump eliminated the “Justice40”…

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The key to a healthy gut microbiome is a healthy diet

The key to a healthy gut microbiome is a healthy diet

Università di Trento: A varied diet rich in vegetables is known to be healthy for one’s well-being. Excessive consumption of meat, especially red meat, can lead to chronic and cardiovascular diseases. That is also because what we eat shapes the gut microbiome. At the same time, excluding certain foods, such as dairy or animal products, is not necessarily a general solution to achieve microbial balance. But can we find out which food products determine differences in the gut microbiome? Starting…

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We all carrying thousands of genetic mistakes accrued over a lifetime

We all carrying thousands of genetic mistakes accrued over a lifetime

Amber Dance writes: You began when egg and sperm met, and the DNA from your biological parents teamed up. Your first cell began copying its newly melded genome and dividing to build a body. And almost immediately, genetic mistakes started to accrue. “That process of accumulating errors across your genome goes on throughout life,” says Phil H. Jones, a cancer biologist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England. Scientists have long known that DNA-copying systems make the occasional blunder…

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