2 hours agoEmilia BelliBBC News

“Vaccines should be treated with nuance, recognizing differences between seasonal vaccines and childhood immunizations,” Dr. Ralph L. Abraham, the state’s surgeon general, wrote in a memo.Louisiana’s top health official said in an internal memo to the state’s Health Department on Thursday that it would no longer use media campaigns or health fairs to promote vaccination against preventable illnesses.The official, Dr. Ralph L. Abraham, Louisiana’s surgeon general, wrote in the memo that the state would “encourage each patient to discuss the risks and benefits of vaccination with their provider” but would “no longer promote mass vaccination.”The letter came on a day when the U.S. Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has raised questions about vaccines, as the new U.S. health secretary. But it was not clear if the memo had come in response to the change in federal leadership.“Vaccines should be treated with nuance, recognizing differences between seasonal vaccines and childhood immunizations, which are an important part of providing immunity to our children,” wrote Dr. Abraham, a former Republican congressman.A spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Health did not immediately respond on Thursday night to questions about the scope of the directive and how it might affect the distribution of vaccines.The Health Department in New Orleans, Louisiana’s largest city, quickly said that it would not follow the state’s lead.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.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, one of President Donald Trump’s most controversial cabinet picks, has been sworn in as the next US Health and Human Services Secretary.

A proposal by the Trump administration to reduce the size of grants for institutions conducting medical research would have far-reaching […]

It is the first ruling in a case challenging “shield laws” intended to protect doctors in states that support abortion rights who send abortion pills to states with bans.In a case that could have major implications for abortion access in the United States, a Texas judge on Thursday ordered a New York doctor to stop prescribing and sending abortion pills to patients in Texas and to pay a penalty of more than $100,000 for providing the medication to one woman.The case is widely expected to reach the Supreme Court and become a pivotal test in the escalating battle between states that ban abortion and states that support abortion rights. It essentially pits Texas, which has a near-total abortion ban, against New York, which has a “telemedicine abortion shield law” intended to protect abortion providers who send medications to patients in other states.These shield laws have become a key abortion rights strategy since the Supreme Court overturned the national right to abortion in 2022. The laws, enacted in eight states so far, stipulate that officials and agencies will not cooperate with civil suits, prosecutions or other legal actions filed against health care providers who prescribe and send abortion medication to patients in other states.Such laws represent a stark departure from typical interstate practices of extraditing, honoring subpoenas and sharing information. Under telemedicine abortion shield laws, which have been in use since summer 2023, health care providers in states where abortion is legal have been sending more than 10,000 abortion pills per month to patients in states with abortion bans or restrictions.The Texas lawsuit was filed in December by the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, against Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter of New Paltz, N.Y., who works with telemedicine abortion organizations to provide pills to patients across the country. The suit alleges that Dr. Carpenter, who is not licensed in Texas, supplied abortion pills to a woman in Texas.The order signed on Thursday by Judge Bryan Gantt of Collin County District Court said that Dr. Carpenter “is permanently enjoined from prescribing abortion-inducing drugs to Texas residents.” Violating an injunction can result in a contempt order from a judge, which could carry additional financial penalties or a jail sentence. The judge also ordered a $100,000 fine and about $13,000 in attorneys’ fees and court costs plus interest.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.

13 hours agoEleanor Lawrie and Michael BuchananSocial affairs, BBC news

Mellencamp, also the daughter of the rock musician John Mellencamp, said on Instagram that she was receiving treatment after experiencing “severe and debilitating” headaches.Teddi Mellencamp, a podcast host and television personality from the “Real Housewives” franchise, announced on Wednesday that she had multiple brain tumors that would be treated with surgery and radiation.Mellencamp, 43, said on her social media account that she had experienced “severe and debilitating” headaches in recent weeks that had become so painful that she required hospitalization. After a CT scan and an M.R.I., doctors found “multiple tumors on my brain, which they believe have been growing for at least six months,” she wrote in a post.Two of the tumors were being surgically removed, and smaller ones would be treated with radiation at a later date, she wrote.Mellencamp was on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” for 72 episodes, from 2017 to January 2024, according to her IMDB page. She has previously spoken publicly on social media and on podcasts about her personal life, including filing for divorce from Edwin Arroyave, as well as her medical history, which has included melanoma and IVF treatment. She and Arroyave have three children, and Mellencamp has a stepdaughter, Isabella Arroyave.Mellencamp, the daughter of the rock musician John Mellencamp, also hosts the iHeartRadio podcast “Two Ts in a Pod” with Tamra Judge of “The Real Housewives of Orange County.”

45 minutes agoNick Triggle, Hugh Pym, Chloe Hayward, Vicki Loader & Jim ReedBBC News

The vets had no symptoms, and one worked only in states where no dairy infections had been reported.Three dairy veterinarians, including one who worked only in states with no known bird flu outbreaks in cows, had recent, undetected bird flu infections, according to a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The results are based on antibody testing of 150 veterinarians working in 46 U.S. states.The findings were not entirely surprising, experts said, but did suggest that the virus, known as H5N1, could be infecting cows and people in more states than have been officially reported.“We do not know the extent of this outbreak in the U.S.,” said Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University. “There are clearly infections happening that we’re missing.”Since the bird flu outbreak in dairy cows was first reported last March, the virus has been confirmed in more than 950 herds in 16 states. It has also been detected in 68 people, 41 of whom had contact with sick cows. Most people have had mild symptoms.The new study, which was published in the C.D.C.’s flagship Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, was initially slated for publication several weeks ago but was delayed by the Trump administration’s pause on public communications from health and science agencies.“It’s important for public health preparedness that we have this data,” said Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, the director of the Boston University Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases.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.

The findings showed the highest mortality occurred among infants who were Black, lived in Southern states or had fetal birth defects.Infant mortality increased along with births in most states with abortion bans in the first 18 months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, according to new research.The findings, in two studies published Thursday in the journal JAMA, also suggest that abortion bans can have the most significant effects on people who are struggling economically or who are in other types of challenging circumstances, health policy experts said.“The groups that are most likely to have children as a result of abortion bans are also individuals who are most likely, for a number of different reasons, to have higher rates of infant mortality,” said Alyssa Bilinski, a professor of health policy at Brown University, who was not involved in the research.Overall, infant mortality was 6 percent higher than expected in states that implemented abortion bans, said Alison Gemmill, one of the researchers, who is a demographer and perinatal epidemiologist in the department of population, family and reproductive health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. That number reflected increases in nine states, decreases in four and no change in one.Dr. Gemmill said that among non-Hispanic Black infants, mortality was 11 percent higher after abortion bans were implemented than would have been expected. Also, there were more babies born with congenital birth defects, situations in which women have been able to terminate their pregnancies if not for abortion bans. Overall, the researchers found that in the states that implemented near-total abortion bans or bans after six weeks’ gestation during that period, there were 478 more deaths of babies in their first year of life after the bans were implemented than would have been expected based on previous years’ data.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.