Publisher Health

4 hours ago

Society’s move to cashless payments may have had an unintended positive side effect, surgeons say – fewer children needing operations or procedures to remove swallowed coins.

As the Trump administration threatens to strip accrediting bodies of their power, many are scrambling to purge diversity requirements.The American Psychological Association, which sets standards for professional training in mental health, has voted to suspend its requirement that postgraduate programs show a commitment to diversity in recruitment and hiring.The decision comes as accrediting bodies throughout higher education scramble to respond to the executive order signed by President Trump attacking diversity, equity and inclusion policies. It pauses a drive to broaden the profession of psychology, which is disproportionately white and female, at a time of rising distress among young Americans.The A.P.A. is the chief accrediting body for professional training in psychology, and the only one recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. It provides accreditation to around 1,300 training programs, including doctoral internships and postdoctoral residencies.Mr. Trump has made accrediting bodies a particular target in his crusade against D.E.I. programs, threatening in one campaign video to “fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics” and “accept applications for new accreditors.”Department of Justice officials have pressured accrediting bodies in recent weeks, warning the American Bar Association in a letter that it might lose its status unless it repealed diversity mandates. The A.B.A. voted in late February to suspend its diversity and inclusion standard for law schools.The concession by the A.P.A., a bastion of support for diversity programming, is a particular landmark. The association has made combating racism a central focus of its work in recent years, and in 2021 adopted a resolution apologizing for its role in perpetuating racism by, among other things, promulgating eugenic theories.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.

David Geier has been hired as a senior data analyst at H.H.S. According to several people, he will examine any potential links between vaccines and autism that were debunked long ago.A steadfast figure in the anti-vaccine movement who has helped shape Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s thinking on a possible link to autism has joined his department to work on a study examining the long-debunked theory, according to people familiar with the matter.The new analyst, David Geier, has published numerous articles in the medical literature attempting to tie mercury in vaccines to autism. In 2012, state authorities in Maryland found that he had been practicing medicine without a license alongside his father, Mark Geier, who was a doctor at the time.Maryland authorities also suspended Mark Geier’s medical license following claims that he endangered children with autism and exploited their parents, according to state records.Federal judges have rejected their research on autism and vaccines as too unreliable to stand up in court.David Geier’s new government role has stunned public health experts, who had already expressed concerns about Mr. Kennedy’s decisions to cancel a long-held vaccine meeting and to cut grants focused on understanding vaccine hesitancy.In addition, David Geier’s involvement in government research heightens their fears that vaccine confidence could be further eroded, especially after Mr. Kennedy’s recent embrace of questionable alternative treatments for measles during the sprawling outbreak in Texas.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 Trump administration announced on Thursday that it was laying off 10,000 employees at the Health and Human Services Department as part of a broad reorganization that reflects the priorities of the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the White House’s drive to shrink the government.The layoffs are a drastic reduction in personnel for the health department, which had employed about 82,000 people and touches the lives of every American through its oversight of medical care, food and drugs.The layoffs and reorganization will cut especially deep at two agencies within the department that have been in Mr. Kennedy’s sights: the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Those agencies are expected to lose roughly 20 percent of their staff members from the latest cuts alone.Together with previous buyouts and early retirements spurred by Trump administration policies, the move will pare the health department down to about 62,000 employees, the agency said.The restructuring is intended to bring communications and other functions directly under Mr. Kennedy. And it includes creating a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America.“We’re going to do more with less,” Mr. Kennedy said, even as he acknowledged that it would be “a painful period for H.H.S.”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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The showdown catapults the interstate abortion wars to a new level.A New York state court on Thursday blocked Texas from filing a legal action against a New York doctor for prescribing and sending abortion pills to a Texas woman.The unprecedented move catapults the interstate abortion wars to a new level, setting the stage for a high-stakes legal battle between states that ban abortion and states that support abortion rights.The dispute is widely expected to reach the Supreme Court, pitting Texas, which has a near-total abortion ban, against New York, which has a shield law that is intended to protect abortion providers who send medications to patients in other states.New York is one of eight states that have enacted “telemedicine abortion shield laws” after the Supreme Court overturned the national right to an abortion in 2022. The laws prevent officials from extraditing abortion providers to other states or from responding to subpoenas and other legal actions — a stark departure from typical interstate practices of cooperating in such cases.The action by the New York court is the first time that an abortion shield law has been used.This case involves Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter of New Paltz, N.Y., who works with telemedicine abortion organizations to provide abortion pills to patients across the country. In December, the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, sued Dr. Carpenter, who is not licensed in Texas, accusing her of sending abortion pills to a Texas woman, in violation of the state’s ban.Dr. Carpenter and her lawyers did not respond to the lawsuit and did not show up for a court hearing last month in Texas. Judge Bryan Gantt of Collin County District Court issued a default judgment, ordering Dr. Carpenter to pay a penalty of $113,000 and to stop sending abortion medication to Texas.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.

51 minutes ago

The Trump administration on Thursday announced a massive layoff of 10,000 employees at the Health and Human Services Department, as part of a dramatic reorganization designed to bring communications and other functions directly under the purview of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.The layoffs, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, amount to a drastic reduction in personnel for the health department, which now employs about 80,000 people. The restructuring will include creating a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America — which will go by the acronym A.H.A.The 28 divisions of the health agency will be consolidated into 15 new divisions, according to a statement issued by the department.Mr. Kennedy’s department touches the lives of every American. Through its various agencies — including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health — it regulates drugs, monitors food safety, tracks infectious disease and conducts biomedical research.All of those agencies have campuses outside of Washington and tend to operate under their own authority — and Mr. Kennedy has been at odds with all of them.

The first time I read a book by the best-selling young adult novelist John Green, I was on a plane. “The Fault in Our Stars,” about a teenage cancer patient who falls in love, made me cry so hard that a flight attendant repeatedly came to check on me.Mr. Green’s new book is nonfiction and it’s about tuberculosis, the infectious disease. TB, he says, has become his great obsession; he talks about it to his millions of young followers on TikTok and YouTube, who at times have mobilized to confront drug manufacturers about high TB drug prices. The book, “Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection,” explains how TB is responsible for everything from romantic poetry to New Mexico’s statehood, and asks why a fully curable disease nevertheless killed 1.3 million people last year alone.It’s a chronicle of slow but hopeful progress. But that progress was derailed recently when the Trump administration’s abruptly dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, ending American support for key health programs around the world. I invited Mr. Green to The New York Times for a conversation about where tuberculosis came from, why it hasn’t gone away and where it all goes from here.Listen to the Full Conversation with John GreenThe Times’s global health reporter Stephanie Nolen sits down with the novelist and YouTuber for a conversation about tuberculosis and his new book.The transcript below has been edited for clarity and brevity.Stephanie Nolen: I really love talking about tuberculosis; I can talk about TB all day. But there aren’t a lot of people in my life who are super happy to sit and talk about TB with me. So this feels like a real luxury. I’m so glad that you’ve come to see us at The Times. Want to sit and talk about TB?John Green: I do, so badly, not least because I am in the same boat. Like, every time I get three or four words into an observation, my kids will raise their hands and say, “Yeah, Dad, we know: It’s tuberculosis.”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.