States were told Monday that they could no longer use grants that were funding infectious disease management and addiction services.The Department of Health and Human Services has abruptly canceled more than $12 billion in federal grants to states that were being used for tracking infectious diseases, mental health services, addiction treatment and other urgent health issues.The cuts are likely to further hamstring state health departments, which are already underfunded and struggling with competing demands from chronic diseases, resurgent infections like syphilis and emerging threats like bird flu.State health departments began receiving notices on Monday evening that the funds, which were allocated during the Covid-19 pandemic, were being terminated, effective immediately.”No additional activities can be conducted, and no additional costs may be incurred, as it relates to these funds,” the notices said.For some, the effect was immediate.In Lubbock, Texas, public health officials have received orders to stop work supported by three grants that helped fund the response to the widening measles outbreak there, according to Katherine Wells, the city’s director of public health.On Tuesday, some state health departments were preparing to lay off dozens of epidemiologists and data scientists. Others, including Texas, Maine and Rhode Island, were still scrambling to understand the impact of the cuts before taking any action.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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Published17 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingBy Robert Cuffe & Gerry GeorgievaBBC VerifyIn the Spring Statement, Chancellor Rachel Reeves is announcing a series of measures to cut the welfare bill by making it more difficult for people to claim certain benefits. The hope is that this will “get Britain working” by incentivising some of those not working to rejoin the labour force. About a quarter of the working age population – those aged 16 to 64 – do not currently have a job. That’s about 11 million people.How many people are unemployed?According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), 4.4% of people were unemployed in the period between October and December 2024,

A 281-page spreadsheet obtained by The Times lists the Trump administration’s plans for thousands of foreign aid programs.The Trump administration intends to terminate the United States’ financial support for Gavi, the organization that has helped purchase critical vaccines for children in developing countries, saving millions of lives over the past quarter century, and to significantly scale back support for efforts to combat malaria, one of the biggest killers globally.The administration has decided to continue some key grants for medications to treat H.I.V. and tuberculosis, and food aid to countries facing civil wars and natural disasters.Those decisions are included in a 281-page spreadsheet that the United States Agency for International Development sent to Congress Monday night, listing the foreign aid projects it plans to continue and to terminate. The New York Times obtained a copy of the spreadsheet and other documents describing the plans.The documents provide a sweeping overview of the extraordinary scale of the administration’s retreat from a half-century-long effort to present the United States to the developing world as a compassionate ally and to lead the fight against infectious diseases that kill millions of people annually.The cover letter details the skeletal remains of U.S.A.I.D. after the cuts, with most of its funding eliminated, and only 869 of more than 6,000 employees still on active duty.In all, the administration has decided to continue 898 U.S.A.I.D. awards and to end 5,341, the letter says. It says the remaining programs are worth up to $78 billion. But only $8.3 billion of that is unobligated funds — money still available to disburse. Because that amount covers awards that run several years into the future, the figure suggests a massive reduction in the $40 billion that U.S.A.I.D. used to spend annually.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.

Supermarkets will be banned from displaying unhealthy snacks near tills or on their website homepages from next year after the Senedd narrowly approved obesity-tackling plans.

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The government has expressed concerns about the timeline for implementing assisted dying, the BBC understands, before measures were tabled to delay when it could be available.

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The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health, installing a contrarian who has pledged to reform scientific funding practices as the leader of the world’s premier medical research agency.Dr. Bhattacharya’s confirmation — by a party-line vote of 53 to 47 — comes as the N.I.H., with a $48 billion budget, has been battered by recent cuts to staffing and orders to pause or cancel vast research funding.Dr. Bhattacharya, a health economist and professor of medicine at Stanford, largely dodged questions about those cuts at a confirmation hearing in early March.He burst into the public spotlight in 2020, when he was among the writers of an anti-lockdown treatise, the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for protecting older and more vulnerable people from Covid while letting the virus spread among younger, healthier people.Questioned by lawmakers this month about the safety of vaccines, Dr. Bhattacharya said that he supported children’s inoculation against diseases like measles, but also that scientists should conduct more research on autism and vaccines, a position at odds with extensive evidence that shows no link between the two.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, who has faced criticism for his reluctance to explicitly recommend vaccinations in the midst of a deadly measles outbreak in West Texas, oversees the N.I.H.