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    5 Places to Turn for Accurate Health Information

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    Changes to federal health websites have raised concerns about their reliability. These independent sources offer an alternative.Soon after President Donald J. Trump took office for his second term, thousands of health websites run by the federal government that kept the public informed about infectious diseases, mental health, vaccines and more were taken offline.Many eventually returned — in large part because a judge ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to temporarily restore the pages — but some had been altered, with sections on topics such as health equity and teen pregnancy deleted. The changes, along with uncertainty around the future of these sites, has led some public health experts to question whether the websites can still be trusted as the gold standard of trustworthy health information, as they’ve long been regarded.Federal health agencies are already facing a crisis of confidence. When a recent national poll asked respondents how much trust they had in the C.D.C. to make the right health recommendations, more than one-third replied “not much” or “not at all.” Nearly half said the same about the Food and Drug Administration.Experts fear that with less trust in public health institutions, more people seeking medical information might turn to social media, where misinformation is rampant. That has made it all the more valuable for the public to find evidenced-based sources of health information.Here are five websites run by independent organizations that have accurate, easy-to-understand information.1. Vaccine Education CenterOf all the health information on federal websites, medical experts have been increasingly concerned about the availability of accurate vaccine information. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s health secretary, has been a longtime critic of vaccines and has spread misinformation about their safety for years.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. More

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      They Caught the Flu, and Never Came Home

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      The virus leads to an estimated 36,000 deaths in the United States each season — many of them so sudden that families are left reeling.Lauren Caggiano had felt sick for days by the time she tested positive for the flu in an emergency room on a February afternoon. Hours later, she was in the intensive care unit. By 4 in the morning, she was on a ventilator.Ms. Caggiano, a paralegal who lived in Oceanside, Calif., doted on her two dogs and had recently become a grandmother, died two days later. She was 49.“You don’t really think, if you’re in decent health, that’s going to be what gets you,” her son, Brandon Salgado, said.Many people recover from a bout of flu within a few days or a week. But every year, the virus still kills more than 36,000 people across the United States and sends hundreds of thousands to the hospital. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that this flu season has been especially severe.Some of those who died were at greater risk for getting seriously ill because of underlying conditions or their age. Others, like Ms. Caggiano, were otherwise healthy before their infections. Some had not received the flu shot, which reduces but does not eliminate the risk of death. Some were hospitalized for weeks; others felt ill for only days before they died.All of their deaths came as a shock to the people who knew them.A Swift DeclinePart of what stunned Mr. Salgado was just how quickly his mother died.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. More

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      Food Safety Jeopardized by Onslaught of Funding and Staff Cuts

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      The Trump administration halted some food testing and shut down a committee studying bacteria in infant formula. Earlier funding cutbacks under the Biden administration now threaten state labs and inspectors.In the last few years, foodborne pathogens have had devastating consequences that alarmed the public. Bacteria in infant formula sickened babies. Deli meat ridden with listeria killed 10 people and led to 60 hospitalizations in 19 states. Lead-laden applesauce pouches poisoned young children.In each outbreak, state and federal officials connected the dots from each sick person to a tainted product and ensured the recalled food was pulled off the shelves.Some of those employees and their specific roles in ending outbreaks are now threatened by Trump administration measures to increase government efficiency, which come on top of cuts already being made by the Food and Drug Administration’s chronically underfunded food division.Like the food safety system itself, the cutbacks and new administrative hurdles are spread across an array of federal and state agencies.At the Food and Drug Administration, freezes on government credit card spending ordered by the Trump administration have impeded staff members from buying food to perform routine tests for deadly bacteria. In states, a $34 million cut by the F.D.A. could reduce the number of employees who ensure that tainted products — like tin pouches of lead-laden applesauce sold in 2023 — are tested in labs and taken off store shelves. F.D.A. staff members are also bracing for further Trump administration personnel reductions.And at the Agriculture Department, a committee studying deadly bacteria was recently disbanded, even as it was developing advice on how to better target pathogens that can shut down the kidneys. Committee members were also devising an education plan for new parents on bacteria that can live in powdered infant formula. “Further work on your report and recommendations will be prohibited,” read a Trump administration email to the committee members.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. More

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      Dr. David Weldon on the Withdrawal

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      particles were causing the problem in these children, and I was surprised that O’Leary withdrew
      his assertions.
      I then called O’Leary on the phone and asked him why he was doing this. There was a very long
      pregnant pause. He then said that it had taken him many years to get to the place where he was
      in the scientific community, and after another pause, he said he had four small children at
      home. I had small children at home myself at the time and I understood what he was saying. If
      he didn’t do it, he was going to be fired. He was going to be ruined.
      British officials were not satisfied with just getting the journal to withdraw the article and
      getting Dr. O’Leary to withdraw his claims. They then decided to begin proceedings to take away
      Dr. Wakefield’s medical license and one of his lead co-authors. Wakefield by this time had
      moved to the United States and to defend himself in court would have cost him hundreds of
      thousands of dollars so he let them take his license away. But his lead co-author Dr. Simon
      Murch was still practicing medicine in England and decided to defend himself in court, and the
      government lost and they were not able to take his license away. If Wakefield had the money to
      defend himself, he would never have lost his license. The court documents clearly show that
      Wakefield and his co-authors had not done anything unethical or inappropriate and their work
      was possibly valid.
      But that was all big Pharma needed. They could go around, saying it and feeding it to the media
      that the research had been withdrawn and Wakefield lost his license. But I looked at the
      micrographs and it sure looked to me like there was vaccine strain measles particles infecting
      the bowels of these kids.
      The CDC was charged with the responsibility of repeating to Wakefield research and showing
      that the measles vaccine was safe, but they never did it the right way. They decided to de
      epidemiologic studies instead of a clinical study. Again, as in the mercury study there were
      claims made that indicators that there was a problem with MMR were there. CDC was accused
      again of changing the protocol and data analysis until the association went away.
      Ironically, I talked with Wakefield after all of this was over. He agreed with me that we have to
      vaccinate our kids for measles. He thought the solution was to give the vaccine at a slightly
      older age, like they do in many European countries. Or we might be able to do research and
      figure out why some kids have a bad reaction to the MMR. Clearly, big Pharma didn’t want me
      in the CDC investigating any of this.
      There are a lot of additional ironies in all of this. I believe the CDC is mostly made up of really
      good people who really care about public health for our nation, though its credibility has been
      seriously tarnished because of the failures in the way the COVID-19 crisis was managed. 40% of
      Democrats and 80% of Republicans, don’t trust the CDC. Many don’t trust Pharma as well. I
      really wanted to try to make the CDC a better more respected agency and killing my nomination
      may have the opposite effect. Distrust may worsen. More

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      Shaming Child-Free People Doesn’t Raise the Birthrate

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      On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data on fertility trends from 1990 to 2023, showing that the birthrate declined slightly in 2023 to 1.62 from 1.66 in 2022. The demographer Jennifer Sciubba summarized the statistics in her newsletter, noting that overall, fertility has declined 22 percent since 1990 in the United States but that “the real decline is much more recent, taking a turn around 2007, just before the Great Recession.”The biggest drop in fertility is among teenagers, Sciubba writes, and the birthrate among women over 30 has increased, with a particular surge in births among women over 40. Sciubba predicts that the birthrate overall will plateau, continuing to hover between 1.55 and 1.7 for the next decade.Being below replacement birthrate presents economic challenges, including to Social Security, though this may not yet be cause for immediate alarm. I don’t know how you can argue that fewer teenage parents is a bad thing, since very few teenagers are emotionally or financially equipped to raise children.I’m not worried that the United States is going to become South Korea. That country, which has the world’s lowest birthrate at 0.75, is the subject of a recent article by The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who does a good job describing what a truly anti-natal society looks like. A 20-something South Korean woman tells him: “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.”Governmental and societal pressure has not really worked to increase the birthrate in South Korea. It’s a society that enforces traditional gender roles and that blames feminists and working women for the decline in fertility. “The insinuation that women are at fault for the demographic crisis has turned gender friction into gender war,” Lewis-Kraus writes, with women swearing off men entirely with the 4B movement rather than become tradwives.In the United States, we see our own very muted version of this dynamic playing out. Religious conservatives slam “childless cat ladies,” and in return, some liberal young women are going “boy sober.” Again, I do not predict that this is going to greatly affect the birthrate in the near term; the United States is a much more gender-progressive and diverse country than South Korea is.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. More

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      C.D.C. Will Investigate Debunked Link Between Vaccines and Autism

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      The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is planning to conduct a large-scale study to re-examine whether there is a connection between vaccines and autism, federal officials said Friday.Dozens of scientific studies have failed to find evidence of a link. But the C.D.C. now falls under the purview of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long expressed skepticism about the safety of vaccines and has vowed to revisit the data.“As President Trump said in his Joint Address to Congress, the rate of autism in American children has skyrocketed. C.D.C. will leave no stone unturned in its mission to figure out what exactly is happening,” Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement Friday. Mr. Nixon did not offer details about the scope or methods of the project. News of the study was first reported Friday morning by Reuters.In pursuing the study, the C.D.C. is defying the wishes of the chairman of the Senate Health Committee, Senator Bill Cassidy, who said this week that further research into any supposed link between vaccines and autism would be a waste of money and a distraction from research that might shed light on the “true reason” for a rise in autism rates.“It’s been exhaustively studied,” Mr. Cassidy, a doctor, said during the confirmation hearing for Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health. “The more we pretend like this is an issue, the more we will have children dying from vaccine-preventable 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. More

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      What Is Hantavirus, the Rare Disease That Killed Betsy Arakawa?

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      Ms. Arakawa, the wife of the actor Gene Hackman, died from the effects of a disease often caused by contact with droppings from infected rodents.Betsy Arakawa, the wife of Gene Hackman, died from the effects of hantavirus, a rare disease often caused by contact with droppings from infected rodents.Hantavirus does not spread among people in the cases found in the United States. It can be transmitted through rodent saliva. But it is most commonly transmitted by breathing in particles of dried deer mouse droppings or urine.At first, hantavirus causes flulike symptoms, including fever, chills, body aches and headaches. But as the disease progresses, respiratory symptoms develop and patients can experience shortness of breath and then lung or heart failure.Here is what to know about hantavirus.What is hantavirus?Hantavirus refers to a family of viruses that are carried by rodents. It is often transmitted to humans by inhaling particles from dried mouse droppings. In North America, Sin Nombre virus is the most common form of this virus, said Sabra L. Klein, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.As of the end of 2022, 864 cases of hantavirus disease had been reported in the United States since surveys of such cases began in 1993, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The “classic” case of hantavirus is contracted by someone who has visited a rural cabin that has a rodent infestation, said Emily Abdoler, a doctor and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School.Hantavirus has flulike symptoms at first.Hantavirus can cause flulike symptoms that appear one to eight weeks after exposure to droppings from an infected rodent, according to Dr. Heather Jarrell, New Mexico’s chief medical examiner. Later, patients often experience shortness of breath and then lung or heart failure.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. More

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      As Ebola Spreads in Uganda, Trump Aid Freeze Hinders Effort to Contain It, U.S. Officials Fear

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      Two more people are reported dead from the disease, and dozens are in isolation, as the outbreak grows.The Ebola outbreak in Uganda has worsened significantly, and the country’s ability to contain the spread has been severely weakened by the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign assistance, American officials said this week.The officials, representing a variety of health and security agencies, made the assessment during a meeting with U.S. Embassy staff in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, on Wednesday. An audio recording of the session was obtained by The New York Times.There have been two more deaths, the mother and newborn sibling of a 4-year-old who died last week, an American official said. The mother and sibling died earlier than the 4-year-old, but were not identified as probable Ebola cases until after they were buried through belated contact tracing.Eighty-two people have so far been identified as close contacts of the mother and her two children, at high risk for infection, and 68 of them are now in quarantine while the others are still being traced. The officials said public health workers’ ability to trace their contacts and conduct surveillance for new cases is severely hindered without U.S. assistance.Two of the contacts are already symptomatic and have been admitted to an isolation hospital ward, an American official in Uganda said in the meeting. The 4-year-old was taken for treatment at four different health facilities before being diagnosed with Ebola, meaning that many of those who have potentially been exposed to the virus are health care workers.During the meeting Wednesday, American officials said that the Ugandan government also lacked sufficient laboratory supplies, diagnostic equipment and protective gear for medical workers and people tracing contacts. The termination of grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development was impeding the ability to procure those supplies, one official said. The meeting, conducted by video, was attended by representatives from the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the Defense Department, the U.S. Embassy in Uganda and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.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. More

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      DOGE Cuts 9/11 Survivors’ Fund, and Republicans Join Democrats in Rebuke

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      After 20 percent of the World Trade Center Health Program staff was terminated last week, Democratic lawmakers were outraged. On Wednesday, Republican lawmakers joined them.In a rare pushback against President Donald J. Trump, a coalition of congressional Republicans from the New York area rebuked the president for cuts to a federal program that administers aid to emergency workers and others suffering from toxins related to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.In a letter to Mr. Trump, seven Republicans urged Mr. Trump “as a native New Yorker who lived in New York City as it recovered from the 9/11 terrorist attacks” to reverse the cuts to the World Trade Center Health Program and rehire staff members who were fired several days ago.They echoed the immediate outcry from Democratic lawmakers and advocates when the cuts were made beginning late last week, as part of Elon Musk’s so-called department of government efficiency, or DOGE, which is cutting spending and eliminating jobs across a wide swath of federal agencies. On Monday, New York’s Democratic senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, issued a letter demanding the cuts be restored.The initial reaction from Republicans was more muted, but by Wednesday, as it became clearer that the blowback to the firings was widespread, the Republican resistance grew more vocal, especially from districts in and around New York City, where the memory of 9/11 still resonates powerfully.“This staff reduction will only make it more difficult for the program to supervise its contracts and to care for its members who are comprised of the brave men and women who ran towards danger and helped in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks,” the congressional members wrote in the letter.It was largely written by Representative Andrew R. Garbarino, a Republican from Long Island, and co-signed by five other Republican congressional colleagues from New York and Representative Chris Smith from New Jersey. The other congressional co-signers were Nick LaLota, Mike Lawler, Claudia Tenney, Nicole Malliotakis and Nick Langworthy, all supporters of Mr. Trump.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. More