Tag Archives: Medicine and Health

Sybil Shainwald, a lawyer who for nearly half a century represented women whose health had been irreparably and often catastrophically harmed by poorly tested drugs and medical devices, died on April 9 at her home in Manhattan. She was 96. Her daughter Laurie Shainwald Kleeger announced the death, which was not widely reported. Ms. Shainwald was 48 years old and …

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, has said that tackling a chronic disease “epidemic” would be a cornerstone of his Make America Healthy Again agenda, often invoking alarming statistics as an urgent reason for reforming public health in this country. On Friday, President Trump released a proposed budget that called for cutting the funding of the Centers for …

With the United States facing its largest single measles outbreak in 25 years, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will direct federal health agencies to explore potential new treatments for the disease, including vitamins, according to an H.H.S. spokesman. The decision is the latest in a series of actions by the nation’s top health official that experts …

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a plan that would require placebo-controlled studies for all new vaccines, surprising some experts who noted that such testing already routinely took place. In a statement, Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said that “all new vaccines will undergo safety testing in placebo-controlled trials” before approval, and …

Environmental Health Perspectives, widely considered the premier environmental health journal, has announced that it would pause acceptance of new studies for publication, as federal cuts have left its future uncertain. For more than 50 years, the journal has received funding from the National Institutes of Health to review studies on the health effects of environmental toxins — from “forever chemicals” …

On April 1, the Trump administration’s effort to slash government funding arrived in Morgantown, W.Va., where federal scientists spent their days studying health and safety threats to American workers. That morning, hundreds of employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health were notified that they were being terminated and would lose access to the building. Left behind were …

Insulin, heart treatments and antibiotics have flowed freely across many borders for decades, exempt from tariffs in a bid to make medicine affordable. But that could soon change. For months, President Trump has been promising to impose higher tariffs on pharmaceuticals as part of his plan to reorder the global trading system and bring key manufacturing industries back to the …

A federal prosecutor in Washington has contacted The New England Journal of Medicine, considered the world’s most prestigious medical journal, with questions that suggested without evidence that it was biased against certain views and influenced by external pressures. Dr. Eric Rubin, the editor in chief of N.E.J.M., described the letter as “vaguely threatening” in an interview with The New York …

The opioid overdose reversal medication commercially known as Narcan saves hundreds of thousands of lives a year and is routinely praised by public health experts for contributing to the continuing drop in opioid-related deaths. But the Trump administration plans to terminate a $56 million annual grant program that distributes doses and trains emergency responders in communities across the country to …

Federal health officials plan to cut funding to the Women’s Health Initiative, effectively shuttering one of the largest and longest studies of women’s health ever carried out. Its findings changed medical practice and helped shape clinical guidelines, preventing tens of thousands of cases of cardiovascular disease and breast cancer. The study, which began in the 1990s when few women were …