Tag Archives: Medicine and Health

Five years after Covid-19 shut down activities all over the world, medical historians sometimes struggle to place the pandemic in context. What, they are asking, should this ongoing viral threat be compared with? Is Covid like the 1918 flu, terrifying when it was raging but soon relegated to the status of a long-ago nightmare? Is it like polio, vanquished but …

The Trump administration has asked researchers and organizations whose work is conducted overseas to disclose ties to those regarded as hostile, including “entities associated with communist, socialist or totalitarian parties,” according to a questionnaire obtained by The New York Times. The online survey was sent this week to groups working abroad to research diseases like H.I.V., gather surveillance data and …

Dangerous pathogens left unsecured at labs across Africa. Halted inspections for mpox, Ebola and other infections at airports and other checkpoints. Millions of unscreened animals shipped across borders. The Trump administration’s pause on foreign aid has hobbled programs that prevent and snuff out outbreaks around the world, scientists say, leaving people everywhere more vulnerable to dangerous pathogens. That includes Americans. …

As Congressional Republicans weigh major cuts to Medicaid, most voters do not want to see the public health plan’s funding dialed back, according to a poll released Friday by KFF, a nonpartisan health research firm. Just 17 percent of respondents said they supported cuts to Medicaid, the government health insurance program that covers more than 70 million people. Forty percent …

At a confirmation hearing for Dr. Marty Makary on Thursday, senators focused heavily on the safety of the abortion pill, with Republican lawmakers urging him to restrict access and Democratic lawmakers demanding that he maintain its current availability. Dr. Makary, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration, signaled that he shared Republicans’ concerns about the current policy, …

On Feb. 8, Colette Delawalla, a graduate student in psychology at Emory University, nervously announced to the online world that she was planning a national protest in defense of science. “I’ve never done this before, but we gotta be the change we want to see in the world,” she wrote in a post on Bluesky, a social media platform. A …

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University health economist who came to prominence crusading against lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic, faced questioning from the Senate health committee on Wednesday morning as President Trump’s nominee to direct the National Institutes of Health. The agency, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, with a $48 billion budget and 27 separate institutes and centers, …

A measles outbreak that has spread over a swath of West Texas, killing one child, shows no signs of slowing, according to data announced on Tuesday by state health officials. The Texas Department of Health reported that since late January, nearly 160 people have contracted measles — 20 more cases than reported on Friday — and 22 have been hospitalized. …

The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw foreign aid and dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development is likely to cause enormous human suffering, according to estimates by the agency itself. Among them: up to 18 million additional cases of malaria per year, and as many as 166,000 additional deaths; 200,000 children paralyzed with polio annually, and hundreds of millions of …

“People will die,” said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, “but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.” The projects terminated include H.I.V. treatment programs that had served millions of people, the main malaria control programs in the worst-affected African countries and global efforts to wipe …