Publisher Health

1 hour agoPaul PigottBBC News

Spasmodic dysphonia is a neurological condition that causes certain muscles in the “voice box,” or larynx, to spasm, often making the voice sound raspy, strained or breathy.Robert F. Kennedy Jr. started developing symptoms of the condition in 1996, when he was making most of his income from speaking engagements. He said he went from being able to speak to “large halls without any amplification” to having a chronic vocal tremor.“I think it makes it problematic for people to listen to me,” he said during a town hall last year. “I cannot listen to myself on T.V.”The chronic condition, which is more common among women than men, is thought to result from problems in the part of brain that helps coordinate the movement of muscles.Roughly 500,000 people in North America have been diagnosed with the condition, with the onset typically occurring when people are middle-aged, without an obvious explanation.The condition may run in families, although a specific gene for spasmodic dysphonia has not yet been identified.There is currently no known cure, although Botox injections and voice therapy may help reduce symptoms.

President Trump’s decision to pull out of the international health agency could deprive the United States of crucial scientific data and lessen the country’s influence in setting a global health agenda.President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization could have harsh consequences for countries around the world that rely on the agency to achieve important health goals, including routine immunizations, outbreak control and nutrition programs.But it could also have unfortunate, unintended repercussions for Americans.Disengaging from the W.H.O. would rob the United States of crucial information about emerging outbreaks like mpox and resurgent dangers like malaria and measles, public health experts said. It may also give more power to nations like Russia and China in setting a global health agenda, and it could hurt the interests of American pharmaceutical and health technology companies.The W.H.O.’s work touches American lives in myriad ways. The agency compiles the International Classification of Diseases, the system of diagnostic codes used by doctors and insurance companies. It assigns generic names to medicines that are recognizable worldwide. Its extensive flu surveillance network helps select the seasonal flu vaccine each year.The agency also closely tracks resistance to antibiotics and other drugs, keeps American travelers apprised of health threats, and studies a wide range of issues such as teen mental health, substance use and aging, which may then inform policies in the United States.“There’s a reason why there was a W.H.O.,” said Loyce Pace, who served as an assistant secretary of health and human services under former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “It’s because we saw value, even as a superpower, in the wake of the world war to come together as a global community on global problems.”“America, no matter how great we are, cannot do this work alone,” she said.Though it will take a year for the withdrawal to take effect — and it is not entirely clear that it can happen without congressional approval — Mr. Trump’s announcement has already prompted drastic cost-cutting measures at the W.H.O.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.

Experts fear a resurgence of infections in low-income countries if the ban were to continue. The waiver remains in place, while officials review foreign aid programs.The Trump administration on Tuesday issued a waiver for lifesaving medicines and medical services, offering a reprieve for a worldwide H.I.V. treatment program that was halted last week.The waiver, announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, seemed to allow for the distribution of H.I.V. medications, but whether the waiver extended to preventive drugs or other services offered by the program, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, was not immediately clear.Still, PEPFAR’s future remains in jeopardy, with potential consequences for more than 20 million people — including 500,000 children — who could lose access to lifesaving medications. Without treatment, millions of people with H.I.V. in low-income countries would be at risk of full-blown AIDS and of premature death.“We can very rapidly return to where the pandemic is exploding, like it was back in the 1980s,” said Dr. Steve Deeks, an H.I.V. expert at the University of California, San Francisco.“This really cannot happen,” he said.On Monday, the Trump administration ordered health organizations in other countries to immediately stop distributing H.I.V. medications purchased with U.S. aid. The directive stemmed from a freeze — which may become permanent — in the activities of PEPFAR, a $7.5 billion program overseen by the State Department.Since it started in 2003, PEPFAR is estimated to have saved more than 25 million lives; more than 5.5 million children have been born free of H.I.V. who otherwise would have been infected.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.

2 hours agoNiall McCrackenBBC News NI Mid Ulster Reporter

Representatives of groups that administer the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, a $7 billion effort funded entirely by the federal government, did not know on Tuesday whether the federal funding pause would affect the program.W.I.C., as it’s usually called, provides vouchers for healthy foods to low-income pregnant and postpartum women, infants and children.Trump administration officials said that programs that provide direct assistance to individuals are supposed to be exempt from the freeze. But W.I.C. support does not come directly from the federal government — like with Medicaid, the federal government sends money to states, which administer the program locally.Like many other organizations that rely on federal dollars for charity work and other forms of aid, the uncertainty around the order left W.I.C. officials unclear on how their funding would be affected.“Millions of people, moms and babies, rely on W.I.C. every day to get the healthy food they need and infant formula, breastfeeding support, and breast pumps they need,” said Alison Hard, director of public policy at the National W.I.C. Association. “Any policy that would put this program at risk would be catastrophic.”Ms. Hard said the organization was seeking assurances from the Trump administration that W.I.C. was excluded from the freeze in funding. Fortunately, she added, states receive W.I.C. funds on a quarterly basis, so the programs should continue to operate.“For now, we encourage families to continue to come in to W.I.C. as normal until we know more,” she said.During the first Trump administration, many immigrant families or mixed-status families feared taking advantage of public benefits programs like W.I.C., even if they were eligible, out of concern that doing so could jeopardize their legal status or ability to get a green card. A 2021 poll by the Protecting Immigrant Families coalition found that 46 percent of respondents in immigrant families that needed help during the Covid-19 pandemic didn’t seek it because of immigration concerns. A more recent 2024 Urban Institute survey found that 17 percent of individuals from immigrant families avoided safety net programs because of immigration concerns.

Gov. Josh Green battled a measles outbreak that killed 83 people, mostly children. President Trump wants Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a vaccine skeptic, as his health policy chief.It was a spasm of tragedy on a remote Pacific island that only a few months later was overshadowed by a global pandemic. But to Gov. Josh Green of Hawaii, the measles outbreak on neighboring Samoa that killed 83 people, mostly babies and children, was a preventable catastrophe wrought by the man President Trump now wants to steer American health policy.In December of 2019 Dr. Green, an emergency medical physician and Hawaii’s Democratic lieutenant governor at the time, rounded up a medical team and thousands of vaccine doses and flew to Samoa to help. Last month he flew to Washington aiming to alert lawmakers from both parties about the role Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mr. Trump’s nominee for health and human services secretary and a longtime vaccine skeptic, played in the Samoa outbreak.Mr. Kennedy’s confirmation hearings are on Wednesday and Thursday before two Senate committees, which will then vote on whether his nomination advances to the full Senate.Democrats are attempting to leverage Mr. Kennedy’s connection to the Samoa outbreak to build opposition to his nomination. Dr. Green recently appeared in an ad by a liberal advocacy group, 314 Action, saying, “R.F.K. Jr. had spread so much misinformation that the country stopped vaccinating, and that caused a tragic and fatal spread of the measles.”In an interview on Monday, Dr. Green said that based on his conversations so far, if the full Senate vote was taken anonymously, “R.F.K. Jr. would be defeated 70-30 or worse.” At the same time, he said, “the political climate has everyone under great pressure to go with the president, or be labeled disloyal.”A spokeswoman for Mr. Kennedy did not respond to requests for comment on Tuesday. In the past he has blamed Samoa’s measles outbreak on “an Indian-manufactured MMR vaccine,” referring to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.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., President Trump’s nominee for health secretary, doesn’t just hold fringe views on vaccines. We fact-checked five recent statements.At Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings, beginning on Wednesday, senators are expected to question him closely about his controversial views on vaccines.For years Mr. Kennedy has questioned the safety of vaccines, including those for polio and measles, two diseases that continue to harm children. More recently, he has said that he’s not planning to take vaccines away from Americans but wants to release safety data to the public — even though nearly all of the data is already publicly available.Mr. Kennedy’s contrarian views extend well beyond vaccines. And as secretary of health and human services, he would have enormous influence on health policy, even on issues typically under state control, by cutting funding for certain programs or elevating others.Here’s a fact check of some of his claims.What was saidThis is false. Mr. Kennedy’s number is off by orders of magnitude.The National Diabetes Statistics Report estimated that in 2021, about 35 per 10,000 children and adolescents younger than 20 — that is, 0.35 percent — had a diagnosis of diabetes. Another study found that 0.1 percent of young people 10 to 19 had diabetes in 2017.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.

Caroline Kennedy wrote a letter to key senators on Tuesday, calling her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a “predator” who is addicted to the attention he gets from airing dangerous views on vaccinations.She called on lawmakers, who will be questioning Mr. Kennedy at his confirmation hearings to become the nation’s health secretary on Wednesday and Thursday, to reject his nomination. She cited his lack of experience, misinformed views on vaccines and personal attributes. In the letter, she described how he led other families members “down the path of drug addiction.”“His basement, his garage, and his dorm room were the centers of the action where drugs were available, and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks,” Ms. Kennedy wrote. “It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.”Her letter was first reported in The Washington Post.She gave him credit for overcoming his drug addiction, which Mr. Kennedy has discussed extensively, but she said that the collateral damage was extensive.“But siblings and cousins who Bobby encouraged down the path of substance abuse suffered addiction, illness and death while Bobby has gone on to misrepresent, lie and cheat his way through life,” Ms. Kennedy wrote.She criticized his advocacy against vaccines, describing it as part of an addiction to attention and power.“Bobby preys on the desperation of parents of sick children — vaccinating his own children while building a following by hypocritically discouraging other parents from vaccinating theirs,” she wrote.

Based on an ARIC cohort analysis, supine hypertension may be more predictive of cardiovascular events than seated hypertension. (JAMA Cardiology)
Blood pressure (BP) readings in public, noisy environments were still fairly accurate. (Annals of Internal Medicine)
One lot of Provepharm’s phenylephrine hydrochloride is under voluntary recall by the manufacturer due to “visible black particulate matter,” according to an FDA alert.
Racial minorities and people on Medicaid were still taking baby aspirin in 2021-2023 despite guideline warnings. (JAMA)
For patients with stable chest pain, management guided by coronary CT angiography was still associated with a sustained reduction in coronary heart disease death or myocardial infarction 10 years into the SCOT-HEART trial. (The Lancet)
Taken from the same blood sample, high-sensitivity cardiac troponin I had a slightly higher diagnostic accuracy for heart attacks, while high-sensitivity cardiac troponin T had higher prognostic accuracy for all-cause and cardiovascular death. (Journal of the American College of Cardiology)
Left atrial appendage (LAA) closure appeared promising for people with atrial fibrillation on hemodialysis, based on an international registry. (JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology)
Imperative Care announced FDA 510(k) clearance of the Zoom stroke thrombectomy system, including its large-bore .088″ catheter.
It’s not just cigarettes: Users of cigars, pipes, and smokeless tobacco displayed subclinical markers of inflammation and atherosclerosis in a cross-sectional study. (Circulation)
Central adiposity, or a high waist-to-height ratio, was prevalent in almost every patient with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction in the PARAGON-HF trial. (European Heart Journal)
The Society of Thoracic Surgeons Intermacs Risk Model was unveiled as a tool to predict 90-day mortality risk from durable left ventricular assist device implantation. (Annals of Thoracic Surgery)
Modeling showed the best performing clinical decision rule regarding when to terminate resuscitation efforts for in-hospital cardiac arrest: when the patient had an unwitnessed, unmonitored cardiac arrest, an initial rhythm of asystole, and resuscitation duration of at least 10 minutes. (JAMA Internal Medicine)
Traditional risk factors were unable to predict exercise-related sudden cardiac death in those with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. (Heart)
And in young people who died from sudden cardiac death due to coronary artery disease, there was no evidence that screening for carotid or aortic plaque would have flagged the event. (European Journal of Preventive Cardiology)
Among toddlers with congenital heart disease, those who received cardiac inpatient neurodevelopmental interventions wound up having reduced delirium and higher cognitive scores, one hospital found. (JAMA Network Open)
The anti-PCKS9 adnectin drug lerodalcibep failed to meet noninferiority criteria against evolocumab (Repatha) for reducing LDL cholesterol in a homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia population. (Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology)

Nicole Lou is a reporter for MedPage Today, where she covers cardiology news and other developments in medicine. Follow

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