Mr. Kennedy told executives of major food companies that he wants synthetic colors removed from their products. “Decision time is imminent,” a trade group warned its members.In his first meeting with top executives from PepsiCo, W.K. Kellogg, General Mills and other large companies, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, bluntly told them that a top priority would be eliminating artificial dyes from the nation’s food supply.At the Monday meeting, Mr. Kennedy emphasized that it was a “strong desire and urgent priority” of the new Trump administration to rid the food system of artificial colorings.In addition, he warned the companies that they should anticipate significant change as a result of his quest for “getting the worse ingredients out” of food, according to a letter from the Consumer Brands Association, a trade group. The Times reviewed a copy that was sent to the group’s members after the meeting.And while Mr. Kennedy said in the meeting that he wanted to work with the industry, he also “made clear his intention to take action unless the industry is willing to be proactive with solutions,” the association wrote.“But to underscore, decision time is imminent,” Melissa Hockstad, who attended the meeting and is the group’s president, wrote in the letter.Later on Monday, Mr. Kennedy issued a directive that would also affect food companies nationwide. He ordered the Food and Drug Administration to revise a longstanding policy that allowed companies — independent of any regulatory review — to decide that a new ingredient in the food supply was safe. Put in place decades ago, the policy was aimed at ingredients like vinegar or salt that are widely considered to be well-understood, and benign. But the designation, known as GRAS, or “generally recognized as safe,” has since grown to include a far broader array of natural and synthetic additives.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Dalvin Modore walked as if there was broken glass beneath his feet, stepping gingerly, his frail shoulders hunched against the anticipation of pain. His trousers had become so loose that he had to hold them up as he inched around his small farm in western Kenya.Mr. Modore has tuberculosis. He is 40, a tall man whose weight has dropped to 110 pounds. He has a wracking cough and sometimes vomits blood. He fears the disease will kill him and has been desperate to be on medication to treat it.Mr. Modore is one of thousands of Kenyans, and hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, with TB who have lost access to treatments and testing in the weeks since the Trump administration slashed foreign aid and withdrew funding for health programs around the globe.Many, like Mr. Modore, have grown significantly sicker. As they go about their lives, waiting and hoping, they are spreading the disease, to others in their own families, communities and beyond.The whole system of finding, diagnosing and treating tuberculosis — which kills more people worldwide than any other infectious disease — has collapsed in dozens of countries across Africa and Asia since President Trump ordered the aid freeze on Jan. 20, Inauguration Day.The United States contributed about half of international donor funding to TB last year and here in Kenya paid for everything from nurses to lab equipment. Trump administration officials have said that other countries should contribute a greater share to global health programs. They say administration is evaluating foreign aid contracts to determine whether they are in the national interest of the United States. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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In the United States, 1 in 3 households has a pet cat.Caroline Gutman for The New York TimesBut many aspects of feline health remain a mystery, even to experts.Octavio Jones for The New York TimesAnd when one of our kittens became critically ill last year, no one could explain why.Emily Anthes/The New York Timespet theoryWhy Are Cats Such a Medical Black Box?March 11, 2025When my husband and I took our cat to the vet early last year, we were hoping to hear that we had nothing to worry about. Olive, a longhaired tortoiseshell kitten who had been the runt of her litter, was naturally quiet and skittish, prone to hiding in closets and napping behind the shower curtain. That made her hard to read — and sometimes simply to find.But days earlier, we had started wondering whether she might be sick. Did she seem even more reserved than usual? It was hard to say, but we decided to ask her vet just to be safe. The vet immediately noticed that Olive’s gums were pale and that her heart was racing. A quick blood test revealed that she was severely anemic, with a blood-cell volume so low, the vet said, it was “incompatible with life.”So began a monthslong ordeal featuring repeated visits to the veterinary I.C.U., more than a dozen blood transfusions and few solid answers.“Cats have been so understudied,” said Elinor Karlsson, a geneticist at UMass Chan Medical School and the Broad Institute. “They’re going to remain a black box unless something changes on the research side.”Dogs as the default“It’s not reasonable to assume that everything that works in a dog will work in a cat,” said Dr. Bruce Kornreich, who directs the Cornell Feline Health Center. “There’s a lot that we still need to learn.”Octavio Jones for The New York TimesOver the last few decades, veterinary medicine has made enormous strides, allowing pets like Olive to receive highly advanced care. But feline medicine has lagged behind its canine counterpart, and it is not always easy to provide evidence-based medicine for cats. “It’s still considered a bit of a niche interest,” said Dr. Karen Perry, a veterinary orthopedic surgeon with a focus on feline health at Michigan State University.

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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 leaving in its wake an injured but mostly unseen group of people who suffer long-term health consequences?Or is it unique in the way it has spawned a widespread rejection of public health advice and science itself, attitudes that some fear may come to haunt the nation when the next major illness arises?Some historians say it is all of the above, which makes Covid stand out in the annals of pandemics.In many ways, historians say, the Covid pandemic — which the World Health Organization declared on March 11, 2020 — reminds them of the 1918 flu. Both were terrifying, killing substantial percentages of the population, unlike, say, polio or Ebola or H.I.V., terrible as those illnesses were.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.