Publisher Health

The United States is ending its financial support for family planning programs in developing countries, cutting nearly 50 million women off from access to contraception.This policy change has attracted little attention amid the wholesale dismantling of American foreign aid, but it stands to have enormous implications, including more maternal deaths and an overall increase in poverty. It derails an effort that had brought long-acting contraceptives to women in some of the poorest and most isolated parts of the world in recent years.The United States provided about 40 percent of the funding governments contributed to family planning programs in 31 developing countries, some $600 million, in 2023, the last year for which data is available, according to KFF, a health research organization.That American funding provided contraceptive devices and the medical services to deliver them to more than 47 million women and couples, which is estimated to have averted 17.1 million unintended pregnancies and 5.2 million unsafe abortions, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual health research organization. Without this annual contribution, 34,000 women could die from preventable maternal deaths each year, the Guttmacher calculation concluded.“The magnitude of the impact is mind-boggling,” said Marie Ba, who leads the coordination team for the Ouagadougou Partnership, an initiative to accelerate investments and access to family planning in nine West African countries.The funding has been terminated as part of the Trump administration’s disassembling of the United States Agency for International Development. The State Department, into which the skeletal remains of U.S.A.I.D. was absorbed on Friday, did not reply to a request for comment on the decision to stop funding family planning. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described the terminated aid projects as wasteful and not aligned with American strategic 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.

Hundreds of federal health workers, including doctors in senior leadership positions, began hearing early Tuesday morning that they are losing their jobs, part of a vast restructuring that will winnow down the agencies charged with regulating food and drugs, protecting Americans from disease and researching new treatments and cures.Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced last week that he is shrinking his department by 10,000 employees. Some senior leaders based in the Washington, D.C., area received notices that they were being reassigned to Indian Health Service territories, a tactic to force people out, employees said, because it would entail moving to other parts of the country.Combined with previous departures, the layoffs will reduce the department from 82,000 to 62,000 employees. The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Notices began arriving at 5 a.m., workers said, affecting offices responsible for everything from global health to medical devices to communications. Some knew the layoffs were coming; at the department headquarters in Washington, officials responsible for minority health and infectious disease prevention were told Friday that their offices were being eliminated, according to employees.Others were caught off guard. At the Food and Drug Administration, senior leaders were pushed out and offices focused on food, drug and medical device policy were hit with deep staff reductions amounting to about 3,500 agency staff members. Some workers said that they discovered they were fired when they attempted to scan their badge to get into the building early Tuesday.The top tobacco regulator, Brian King, was offered a job with a regional office of the Indian Health Service that includes Alaska, according to Mitch Zeller, his predecessor at the division. Other staff who oversee veterinary medicine and coordinate the complex work of reviewing new drug applications that can run for thousands of pages were let go.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.

32 minutes ago

Five years after the pandemic began, interest in the anti-parasitic drug is rising again as right-wing influencers promote it — and spread misinformation about it.Joe Grinsteiner is a gregarious online personality who touts the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin. In a recent Facebook video, he produced a tube of veterinary-grade ivermectin paste — the kind made for deworming horses.He gave the tube a squeeze. Then he licked a slug of the stuff, and gulped.“Yum,” Mr. Grinsteiner said in the Feb. 25 video, one of a number of ivermectin-related posts he has made that have drawn millions of views on Facebook this year. “Actually, that tastes like dead cancer.”Ivermectin, a drug proven to treat certain parasitic diseases, exploded in popularity during the pandemic amid false claims that it could treat or prevent Covid-19. Now — despite a persistent message from federal health officials that its medical benefits are limited — interest in ivermectin is rising again, particularly among American conservatives who are seeing it promoted by right-wing influencers.Mr. Grinsteiner, 54, is a Trump supporter and country music performer who lives in rural Michigan. He has claimed in his videos that ivermectin cured his skin cancer, as well as his wife’s cervical cancer. In a video last month, he said a woman told him her nonverbal autistic child had become verbal after using ivermectin. In a recent phone interview, Mr. Grinsteiner said that he takes a daily dose of ivermectin to maintain his general well-being.There is no evidence to support people taking ivermectin to treat cancer or autism. Yet Mr. Grinsteiner believes that the medical and political establishments just want to keep average people from discovering the healing powers of a relatively affordable drug. 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.

Pamela C. Ronald, PhD
Distinguished Professor in the Department of
Plant Pathology and the Genome Center
University of California, Davis
Michael Rosbash, PhD
Peter Gruber Professor of Neuroscience
Brandeis University
Sara Rosenbaum, JD
Professor Emerita Health Law and Policy
George Washington University
Irwin Rosenberg, MD
University Professor Emeritus in Medicine and
Nutrition
Tufts University
Steven A. Rosenberg, MD, PhD
Chief, Surgery Branch
National Cancer Institute
Mendel Rosenblum, PhD
Cheriton Family Professor of Engineering
Stanford University
Linda Rosenstock, MD, MPH
Dean Emeritus and Professor
University of California, Los Angeles
Linda Rosenstock, MD, MPH
Dean Emeritus and Professor
UCLA
Meredith Rosenthal, PhD
Professor of Health Economics and Policy
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
David K. Rosner, PhD
Ronald Lauterstein Professor
Columbia University
Lainie Friedman Ross, MD, PhD
Dean’s Professor and Chair, Department of
Health Humanities and Bioethics, Director,
Paul M Schyve MD Center for Bioethics
University of Rochester
Cornelius Rosse, MD, DSC
Professor Emeritus
University of Washington, School of Medicine
Peter J. Rossky, PhD
Professor
Rice University
Alvin E. Roth, PhD
Professor
Stanford University
James A. Roth, DVM, PhD
Distinguished Professor
Iowa State University
Lucia B. Rothman-Denes, PhD
Haig P. Papazian Distinguished Service
Professor, Department of Molecular Genetics
and Cell Biology
University of Chicago
Martine F Roussel, PhD
Professor
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, MD, MPH, PhD
Professor
University of Washington
Diane Rowland, ScD
Executive Vice President Emerita
Kaiser Family Foundation
John L. Rubenstein, MD, PhD
Professor of Psychiatry
University of California, San Francisco
Ronitt A. Rubinfeld, PhD
Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science
MIT
David R. Rubinow, MD
Chair Emeritus and Professor
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Alexander Rudensky, PhD
Chairman, Immunology Program, Lloyd Old
Chair in Clinical Investigation, Investigator,
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Joan V. Ruderman, PhD
Nelson Professor of Cell Biology (Emeritus)
Harvard Medical School
Roberta L. Rudnick, PhD
Distinguished Professor
University of California, Santa Barbara
David W. Russell, PhD
Emeritus Professor of Molecular Genetics
University of Texas Southwestern Medical
Center
58

The government has agreed a new funding package with pharmacy negotiators in England, leading some pharmacies to call off protests that were planned for later this week.

44 minutes ago

17 minutes ago

The Eli Lilly drug caused a major drop in the blood levels of Lp(a), but further research is needed to show that it will prevent heart attacks and strokes.As many as one in five people — an estimated 64 million in the United States — have elevated levels of a tiny particle in their blood. It can greatly increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes.But few know about it, and almost no doctors test for it, because there was not much to be done. Diet does not help. Neither does exercise. There have been no drugs.But in the near future, that may change.On Sunday, cardiologists announced that an experimental drug made by Eli Lilly, lepodisiran, could lower levels of the particle, Lp(a), by 94 percent with a single injection. The effects lasted for six months and there were no significant side effects.But it is not yet confirmed that reducing Lp(a) levels also reduces the risk of heart attacks and strokes. That awaits large clinical trials that are now underway.The Lilly research was presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology and simultaneously published in the New England Journal of Medicine. At least four other companies are also testing innovative drugs that block the body’s production of Lp(a), a mix of lipids and a protein.Dr. David Maron, a preventive cardiologist at Stanford not involved in the Lilly research, said the evidence of profound and long-lasting reduction in lipoprotein levels with lepodisiran was “thrilling.”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.

Women across England will be able to get the morning-after pill for free from pharmacies from later this year, the government has said.