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    Trump administration to cut billions in medical research funding

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    The Trump administration is cutting billions of dollars in medical research funding for universities, hospitals and other scientific institutions by reducing the amount they get in associated costs to support such research.The National Institutes of Health (NIH) said that it was reducing the amount of “indirect” medical research funding going to institutions, which will cut spending by $4bn a year.A limit of 15% of grants awarded to institutions will be allowed for associated costs such as buildings, equipment and support staff. This is a major reduction on what was previously allowed under the NIH grant system.“The United States should have the best medical research in the world,” the NIH said in a statement on Friday. “It is accordingly vital to ensure that as many funds as possible go towards direct scientific research costs rather than administrative overhead.”In the financial year of 2023, $9bn out of $35bn in awarded grants went to cover overheads, the NIH said, adding that the new rate will be more in line with requirements of private foundations.The move has been hailed by supporters of Trump’s attempts to slash government spending. The “department of government efficiency”, headed by billionaire Trump supporter Elon Musk, welcomed the funding cut, tweeting that it was an “amazing job” by the NIH.However, researchers warned that the cut will imperil vital medical research. “This is a surefire way to cripple lifesaving research and innovation,” said Matt Owens, president of the Council on Government Relations, which represents universities and academic medical centers. “Reimbursement of facilities and administrative expenditures are part and parcel of the total costs of conducting world-class research.“America’s competitors will relish this self-inflicted wound. We urge NIH leaders to rescind this dangerous policy before its harms are felt by Americans.”Democrats also criticized the decision, which follows a broader freeze on some research grants imposed by the Trump administration.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe impact of the funding cut will “be nothing short of catastrophic for so much of the lifesaving research patients and families are counting on”, said Patty Murray, a Democratic senator.“Sick kids may not get the treatment they need. Clinical trials may be shut down abruptly with dangerous consequences. Just because Elon Musk doesn’t understand indirect costs doesn’t mean Americans should have to pay the price with their lives.” More

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      Be clear about what Trump and Musk’s aid axe will do: people will face terror and starve, many will die | Gordon Brown

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      An earthquake of magnitude 7.0 or above could not have caused more carnage. Recent floods in Asia and droughts in Africa have been catastrophic, yet they have inflicted less damage and affected fewer people than the sudden withdrawal of billions of dollars of US aid from the world’s most volatile hotspots and its most vulnerable people. Coming alongside President Trump’s plan for a US takeover of Gaza, the US administration’s resolve to shut down its international aid agency sends a clear message that the era when American leaders valued their soft power is coming to an end.But while the Gaza plan is as yet only on the drawing board, USAid cuts – which will see funding slashed and just 290 of the more than 10,000 employees worldwide retained, according to the New York Times – have already begun to bite this week. We have seen the halting of landmine-clearing work in Asia, support for war veterans and independent media in Ukraine, and assistance for Rohingya refugees on the border of Bangladesh. This week, drug deliveries to fight the current mpox and Ebola outbreaks in Africa have been stopped, life-saving food lies rotting at African ports, and even initiatives targeting trafficking of drugs like fentanyl have been cut back. One of the world’s most respected charities, Brac, says that the 90-day blanket ban on helping vulnerable people is depriving 3.5 million people of vital services.One critical programme has been granted a limited waiver. Pepfar, created by Republican president George W Bush, offers antiretroviral prescriptions to 20 million people around the world to combat HIV and Aids. Its activities escaped the ban only after warnings that a 90-day stoppage could lead to 136,000 babies acquiring HIV. But it has still been blocked from organising cervical cancer screening, treating malaria, tuberculosis and polio, assisting maternal and child health, and efforts to curtail outbreaks of Ebola, Marburg and mpox.Not only does the stop-work edict mean that, in a matter of days, the US has destroyed the work of decades building up goodwill around the world, but Trump’s claim that America has been over-generous is exposed as yet another exaggeration. Norway tops the list as biggest donor of official development assistance (ODA) as a percentage of gross national income (GNI) at 1.09%; Britain is at just over 0.5%, albeit down from the UN target of 0.7%; but the US is near the bottom of the advanced economies at 0.24% – alongside Slovenia and the Czech Republic. It is simply the size of the US economy – 26% of world output – that means that the 0.24% adds up to more aid than any other country. The US provided $66bn in 2023, making USAid a leader in global humanitarian aid, education and health, not least in addressing HIV/Aids, malaria and tuberculosis.On Sunday night, Trump told reporters that USAid had been “run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out”. “I don’t want my dollars going towards this crap,” his press spokesperson added, with one of the president’s chief advisers Elon Musk calling the agency a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America”. “You’ve got to basically get rid of the whole thing. It’s beyond repair,” he said. “We’re shutting it down.”View image in fullscreenIndeed, in a post on X last weekend, Musk shared a screenshot quoting the false claim that “less than 10 percent of our foreign assistance dollars flowing through USAID is actually reaching those communities”. The implication is that the remaining 90% was diverted, stolen, or just wasted. In fact, the 10% figure is the proportion of the budget going directly to NGOs and organisations in the developing world. The remaining 90% is not wasted – instead, it comprises all the goods and services that USAid, American companies and NGOs, and multilateral organisations deliver in kind, from HIV drugs to emergency food aid, malaria bed nets, and treatment for malnutrition. It is simply untrue that 90% of aid falls into the wrong hands and never reaches the most vulnerable.In fact, the initial blanket executive order proved to be such a blunt instrument – the only initial exemptions were for emergency food aid and for military funding for Israel and Egypt – that it had to be modified to include exceptions for what the government called “life-saving humanitarian assistance”, although it stopped short of defining them. “We are rooting out waste. We are blocking woke programs. And we are exposing activities that run contrary to our national interests. None of this would be possible if these programs remained on autopilot,” said a statement released by the state department. The new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, now wants his department to control the whole budget and close down USAid entirely. “Does it make America safer? Does it make America stronger? Does it make America more prosperous?” Rubio asked in a statement that suggested that the America which generally worked multilaterally in a unipolar era is now determined to act unilaterally in a multipolar one.This new stance is not just “America first” but “America first and only” – and a gift to Hamas, IS, the Houthi rebels, and all who wish to show that coexistence with the US is impossible. The shutdown is also good news for China, whose own global development initiative will be strengthened as it positions itself to replace America. Desperate people will turn to extremists who will say that the US can never again be trusted. And by causing misery and by alienating actual and possible allies, far from making America great again, the cancellation of aid will only make America weaker.The tragedy for the planet is that US aid cuts come on top of diminishing aid budgets among the world’s richest economies, from Germany to the UK. International aid agencies are now so underfunded that in 2024, for the second consecutive year, the UN covered less than half of its humanitarian funding goal of nearly $50bn – at a time when increasing conflicts and natural disasters necessitate more relief donor grants than ever. Yes, we can discuss how greater reciprocity can create a fairer system of burden sharing – but further cuts in aid threaten more avoidable deaths, and a poorer world will ultimately make the US poorer too.US generosity is often seen as mere charity, but it is in the country’s self-interest to be generous because the creation of a more stable world benefits us all. We all gain if USAid can mitigate the spread of infectious diseases, prevent malnutrition in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Sudan, halt the upsurge of IS in Syria and support a fair, humanitarian reconstruction of Gaza and Ukraine. Only the narrowest and most blinkered view of what constitutes “America first” can justify the disaster America has unloaded on the world.

      Gordon Brown is the UN’s special envoy for global education and was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010 More

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      Mitch McConnell condemns petition to revoke approval of polio vaccine by RFK Jr adviser

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      US Senate minority leader and polio survivor Mitch McConnell has condemned attempts to undermine the polio vaccine after reports that a lawyer affiliated with Robert F Kennedy Jr – the health secretary pick for Donald Trump’s second presidency – petitioned for the Food and Drug Administration to revoke its approval of the vaccine.In a statement reported by numerous outlets on Friday, McConnell, who contracted the disease as a child in 1944 – 11 years before the licensing of the world’s first polio vaccine – said: “The polio vaccine has saved millions of lives and held out the promise of eradicating a terrible disease. Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uninformed – they’re dangerous.”The 82-year-old went on to add: “Anyone seeking the Senate’s consent to serve in the incoming administration would do well to steer clear of even the appearance of association with such efforts.”McConnell’s latest comment comes after the New York Times first reported that Aaron Siri, a lawyer helping Kennedy select incoming health officials for Trump’s second White House term, filed a petition in 2022 in which he called on the FDA to revoke its polio vaccine approval. Trump has nominated Kennedy, an avowed vaccine skeptic, as health secretary for his incoming administration – a move widely criticized by health experts.According to the New York Times, Siri filed the petition on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, a major anti-vaccination organization in the US. Siri has also asked federal regulators to withdraw or suspend vaccines for hepatitis B and 13 other vaccines, the outlet reported.Kennedy’s anti-vaccination beliefs have been widely debunked, including the unsupported link between vaccines and autism.Polio, also known as poliomyelitis, is a highly infectious viral disease that mostly affects children under five years old. Transmitted through contaminated water, food or contact with an infected person, the poliovirus destroys nerve cells in the spinal cord, in turn causing muscle wasting and paralysis.Since 1988, polio cases have decreased by more than 99% across the world, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stated on its website, adding that polio vaccines have prevented approximately 20m cases of paralysis in children since then.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn response to the reports, a Trump spokesperson for Kennedy Jr told the Washington Post that Siri “has never had a conversation about these petitions with Mr Kennedy or any of the [health and human services] nominees at any point”.Among other things, the spokesperson added that the vaccine “should be investigated and studied appropriately”, which it already has been. More

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      RFK Jr to research unsupported link between vaccines and autism, Trump says

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      Donald Trump has said Robert F Kennedy Jr, his nominee for health secretary, may investigate a supposed link between vaccines and autism – despite a consensus among the medical establishment debunking any such connection.In a wide-ranging interview with NBC, the US president-elect claimed an investigation was justified by the increasing prevalence of autism diagnoses among American children over the past 25 years.“When you look at what’s going on with disease and sickness in our country, something’s wrong,” Trump said after the interviewer, Kristen Welker, asked him if he wanted to see some vaccines eliminated – a position for which Kennedy has argued.“If you take a look at autism, go back 25 years, autism was almost nonexistent. It was, you know, one out of 100,000 and now it’s close to one out of 100.”According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one out of every 36 children in the US were diagnosed with autism in 2020, compared with one in 150 in 2000.Kennedy, a noted vaccine sceptic, has repeatedly peddled discredited theories that the conditions is caused by childhood vaccinations.“I do believe that autism does come from vaccines,” he said in a 2023 Fox News interview in which he called for more vaccine testing.“We should have the same kind of testing place or control trials that we have for other every other medication. Vaccines are exempt from pre-licensing control trials, so that there’s no way that anybody can tell the risk profile of those products, or even the relative benefits of those products before they’re mandated. We should have that kind of testing.”Trump – who has previously said Kennedy would be allowed to “go wild” on health – said his health secretary pick would not “reinvent the wheel totally”.“He’s not going to upset any system,” he said.But on autism, he added: “Somebody has to find out. If you go back 25 years ago, you had very little autism. Now you have it … When you talk about autism, because it was brought up, and you look at the amount we have today versus 20 or 25 years ago, it’s pretty scary.”Scientists have attributed the rise in autism diagnoses to improved screening methods while saying it is caused by a complex mix of factors, including genetics, environment and conditions during pregnancy and birth.The World Health Organization has definitely ruled out a connection between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine or other childhood inoculations.Research led by the British doctor Andrew Wakefield asserting a link between autism and the MMR jab was later discredited, with the Lancet, a medical journal, issuing a full retraction of a paper it had published based on it.Wakefield was later banned from practicing in Britain after being found by the country’s general medical council to have broken its rules on research and to have acted “dishonestly” and with a “callous disregard” for children’s health.The Guardian reported in 2018 that Wakefield had attended an inaugural ball marking the start of Trump’s first presidency the previous year at which he was quoted calling for a shakeup of the US medical establishment.“What we need now is a huge shakeup at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – a huge shakeup,” he said. “We need that to change dramatically.” More

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      Britain needs a ‘vaccine taskforce’ to prepare for the next pandemic, Lords warn

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      Your support helps us to tell the storyFrom reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it’s investigating the financials of Elon Musk’s pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, ‘The A Word’, which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.Your support makes all the difference.CloseRead moreBritain needs a “peacetime vaccine task force” to prepare for the next pandemic, ministers have been warned amid concerns that the government could forget the lessons of Covid-19.The Commons science and technology committee has also called for the government to appoint a chief vaccines officer to help prepare the country for future threats. In a letter sent this week, Baroness Brown of Cambridge, chair of the committee, said evidence to an inquiry held by the committee raised “troubling concerns about our capacity to manufacture vaccines for future biological threats”.The warning comes after the government announced it has bought more than 5 million doses of bird flu vaccines to help battle a potential future pandemic. This follows an increase in transmission of the virus among animals. The committee said its interest in vaccine development in the UK was prompted by “a series of worrying developments”, including the sale of the Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre (VMIC) in Oxfordshire, and the later mothballing of the facility. It also cited 11 reports that a planned reduction in state aid threatened AstraZeneca’s proposed vaccine manufacturing facility in Liverpool. Giving evidence in January, Dr Clive Dix, former chair of the vaccine taskforce, said the Conservative government had “destroyed almost everything that was going on” in favour of reliance on Moderna. He said there was less resilience in the UK now because many manufacturers had walked away from the UK. The committee’s letter added: “Our witnesses raised concerns that “other countries have learned the lessons … from where we are sitting, it appears that government and the public have concluded that the UK can do this and that we do not need to improve our systems”, comparing it unfavourably to the more pro-active EU response discussed below.”It added: “The UK needs to ensure it retains robust vaccine manufacturing and scale-up capacity for the next pandemic, but it is falling behind other countries. Witnesses argued that the UK was fortunate to be able to produce a vaccine at speed in 2020 and should not assume this will be possible in the future without renewed and sustained support, and that this relative success may have led to some complacency compared to countries that have funded vaccine manufacturing more urgently.”Earlier this year the government announced a new partnership with pharma giant Moderna to trial a new norovirus vaccine. More

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      Raw milk CEO whose products have been recalled may lead US raw milk policy

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      Mark McAfee, a California raw milk producer whose products have been recalled several times recently due to bird flu contamination, said he has been approached by Robert F Kennedy Jr’s team to guide the upcoming administration on raw milk policy.McAfee, whose dairy products were recalled after state officials detected bird flu virus in milk samples, said that the transition team for Kennedy, the nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, asked him to apply for a position advising on raw milk policy and standards development. The idea, he told the Guardian, would be to create a “raw milk ordinance”, mirroring the existing federal “standard milk ordinance”.Kennedy is a notable fan of raw, or unpasteurized, milk, including McAfee’s products. If confirmed, he has said, he would work to remove restrictions on raw milk, which the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have so far advised against consuming.Kennedy’s team did not respond immediately to the Guardian’s request for comment.If McAfee, whose farm is the largest producer of raw milk in the US, were to gain a role in the upcoming administration, it would be in line with the upcoming administration’s broader edict to put industry heads in roles regulating the very products they sell.Trump has also appointed oil executive Chris Wright for secretary of energy, and Wall Street executive Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary.McAfee’s Raw Farm in Fresno supplies raw milk and milk products to grocery stories across California, and has the unique distinction of supplying the kefir used in the smoothies at Los Angeles’s celebrity-approved Erewhon market.Nicole Shanahan, Kennedy’s running mate when he ran against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination, interviewed McAfee for a documentary about raw milk released earlier this year. She told McAfee that Kennedy was a fan, and drinks his milk when he is home in Malibu. In a post on X in October, Kennedy said that with Trump in office, the FDA’s “war on public health” would end, as would its “aggressive suppression” of raw milk.Raw milk, which is not heated to kill harmful pathogens, has been linked to the outbreak of bacterial infections including a strain of E coli that can cause kidney failure. McAfee’s farm has also been involved in several lawsuits stemming from a salmonella outbreak that sickened at least 171 people in California last year.The federal government does not regulate the sale of raw milk – states do – but the FDA prohibits the interstate sale of unpasteurized milk for human consumption. In 2008, McAfee’s company pleaded guilty to putting “pet food” stickers on its raw milk in order to illegally sell it across state lines for human consumption.McAfee and other proponents of raw milk have claimed that it has more beneficial enzymes and diverse probiotics than pasteurized milk. The current FDA and researchers have countered that milk is not, in fact, a significant source of probiotics in the first place, and that the bacteria found in raw milk – which come through infected udder tissues, or the dairy environment including soil and cow manure), and milking equipment – are not the kinds that benefit our digestive systems.But the consumption of raw milk has come under particular scrutiny this year amid a bird flu, or H5N1, outbreak, which included the first documented human cases of the virus. No known cases of bird flu virus have been confirmed in people who drank raw milk, although there are three cases in North America where the source has not been identified. Contact with raw milk and the handling of raw milk, however, has been associated with infections – especially among dairy workers.Research suggests that milk carries huge amounts of viral particles. “The most infectious thing from the cows is the milk,” said Meghan Davis, a molecular epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University studying environmental health. In some cases, cows that tested negative for H5N1 in their respiratory tracts were found to be carrying the virus in their milk.Consuming raw milk amid the bird flu outbreak, Davis said, is inherently risky. While most people who have been infected with bird flu have reported mild illnesses, people with compromised or suppressed immune systems could experience more severe symptoms. And as more people are infected, the virus is more likely to mutate and develop more infectious or severe strains that could affect the broader population.“The impact of another pandemic would be awful,” said Davis. “Especially of a pandemic that really affects our food-producing animals as well as people.”Cats who have drunk infected raw milk have exhibited severe neurological symptoms and died.Still, McAfee vehemently denies that raw milk could be implicated in any such risks.“This is the newest platform for the FDA to attack us,” McAfee said. “There are no reported illnesses in the United States regarding [bird flu] and raw milk. Zero. But yet they say the sky is falling.”Like other proponents of raw milk, he has suggested that milk from infected cows boosts immunity to bird flu by passing on antibodies. Antibodies to H5N1, however, have not been found in raw milk products, and cow antibodies would not confer immunity to humans.This week, Raw Farm voluntarily recalled all milk and cream products made between 9 and 27 November after tests found bird flu virus in retail samples and dairy storage and bottling sites. The California department of food and agriculture also quarantined the farm and suspended the distribution of Raw Farm product produced on or after 27 November. More

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      ‘The science of fluoride is starting to evolve’: behind the risks and benefits of the mineral

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      A national conversation about fluoride’s health benefits exploded this fall after a federal toxicology report, court ruling and independent scientific review all called for updated risk-benefit analysis.Fluoride, a naturally occurring mineral in some regions, has been added to community water supplies since the mid-20th century when studies found exposure dramatically reduced tooth decay.The controversy, heightened by description of the mineral as “industrial waste” by Robert F Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump’s pick to lead the US health department, highlights questions some towns are now wrestling with: should the mineral’s well-established protective effects against tooth decay be prioritized lest Americans, and especially children, be subject to unnecessary pain and shame from an unhealthy smile? Or should the possibility of neurodevelopment effects be prioritized, even as studies continue?“Fluoride is the perfect example of helping people without them even having to do anything,” said Dr Sreenivas Koka, the former dean of the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s school of dentistry. The state is a “dental desert”, where there is only one dentist for every 2,120 residents. “Fluoride in the water – all you have to do is drink water and you’ll get the benefit.”Fluoride is added to about 72% of community water supplies in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC again endorsed the practice in a scientific statement this May, saying it found no “convincing scientific evidence linking community water fluoridation with any potential adverse health effect or systemic disorder such as an increased risk for cancer, Down syndrome, heart disease, osteoporosis and bone fracture, immune disorders, low intelligence, renal disorders, Alzheimer disease, or allergic reactions”.Still, controversy over water fluoridation recently made headlines after two high-profile reports and a federal court ruling. The US National Toxicology Program set off a firestorm in August when it published a systematic review that found with “moderate confidence” that children exposed to fluoride levels twice those recommended for drinking water (1.5mg per liter versus the recommended 0.7mg per liter) “are consistently associated with lower IQ in children”.Then, in October, a new Cochrane Review lowered the estimated impact of fluoride, citing the widespread use of fluoride in toothpaste beginning in 1975.“Studies conducted in 1975 or earlier showed a clear and important effect on prevention of tooth decay in children,” Cochrane Review researchers wrote. “However, due to the increased availability of fluoride in toothpaste since 1975, it is unlikely that we will see this effect in all populations today.”The public debate comes as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s largest publicly funded research agency, is both a key funder of research advancing society’s understanding of fluoride’s non-dental health effects and an agency squarely in Trump’s crosshairs.The agency is one of the top targets for cuts and restructuring. Paradoxically, that could mean that critics such as Kennedy cut research on fluoride, even as the NIH funds research into potential detriments. The incoming administration has not made proposals on how to improve oral health in the US.Fluoride’s health benefits were investigated in the early 20th century, when a Colorado Springs dentist questioned why town residents had brown, mottled and decay-resistant teeth – now known as fluorosis.It was later found that fluoride naturally occurred at high levels in Colorado Springs, causing the cosmetic defects. Its decay-resistant properties were confirmed in a landmark 1945 study in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which found children in Grand Rapids were 60% less likely to develop dental caries (better known as cavities) with fluoride added to water.By 1999, the CDC hailed water fluoridation as one of public health’s greatest victories, alongside seat belts and vaccination. That view was buttressed by a 2015 Cochrane Review, considered the gold standard, that found fluoridating water at 0.7mg per liter led to a nearly 26% reduction in tooth decay, a figure still cited by the American Dental Association (ADA) and American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) today.The need for preventive oral health solutions is profound in the US – more than 68 million people lack dental insurance and about one in four adults said in a survey they have avoided the dentist because of cost.In addition, school children lose an estimated average of 34m school hours each year due to unexpected dental visits; 2 million Americans visit the emergency room each year because of tooth pain; half a million travel abroad for cheaper care and one in five American seniors lack a single natural tooth. Lack of dental access is so common in some areas, doctors in prison frequently have patients who have never seen one.“One of the things I routinely ask young people in juvenile jail is: ‘Do you have a doctor? Do you have a dentist?’” said Dr Fred Rottnek, former medical director of St Louis county jails in Missouri and now a professor of community medicine at Saint Louis University School of Medicine. “A lot of them have never reported going to the dentist.”Modern inquiry into fluoride’s non-dental health effects began to pick up pace in 2015, when the National Toxicology Program (NTP) requested a systematic review on fluoride’s impact on neurodevelopment. By 2019, toxicology researcher Bruce Lanphear, of Simon Fraser University in Canada, co-authored a study finding fluoride exposure was associated with decreased IQ, which would later be incorporated into the NTP’s systematic review.“That gives you an indication that the science of fluoride is starting to evolve – it wasn’t set in stone 70 years ago,” he said.Lanphear, and a small group of like-minded toxicology researchers, argue now is the time for us to “pause and have an independent scientific committee look at all this new evidence” as “we have a lot of new science specifically about fluoride and the developing brain,” he said.Critics were buttressed again when a federal court ruled in September that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) needed to evaluate fluoride under the Toxic Substances Control Act.But physicians, dentists and mainstream professional associations from the American Dental Association to the American Academy of Pediatrics stand by recommendations for fluoridated water.While some towns step away from fluoride, communities such as Buffalo, New York, are restarting programs.“This is a shame if we don’t take advantage of what we know from the science,” said Koka about the preventive effects of fluoride. “Are there challenges to doing it right? Yes, but should they be so strong they overcome trying at all? That’s a tragedy.”The CDC has also refined guidance about fluoridation in recent years. In 2015, its water fluoridation recommendations went down to 0.7mg per liter of water, from 0.7 to 1.0mg per liter dependent on climate. Later, the CDC issued a 2019 report that advised parents of children younger than two to speak with their dentist about fluoridated toothpaste, and reminded parents of children younger than three to use only a “grain of rice”-sized “smear”.As critics argue that federal agencies’ recommendation lag behind, the US government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) has become one of the chief funders of research into fluoride’s potential impacts on IQ.“Getting funding from the NIH shows they are interested in this important question,” said Christine Till, an assistant professor at York University in Canada and a co-investigator with Lanphear, whose grant studying tooth dentin and neurodevelopment in Canada was funded by the NIH, but turned down by the Canadian government.Others, such as Ashley Malin, epidemiology professor at University of Florida, and Dana Goin, assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, have also received NIH funding to research fluoride’s non-dental health effects. Malin is studying fluoride’s impact on children’s sleep and Goin is investigating reproductive health effects.“There is a lot of ongoing work in this area, particularly in the US,” said Goin. “Hopefully, the results from these studies will help determine whether EPA drinking water regulations and CDC recommendations for water fluoridation are adequately balancing improvements in dental health from fluoridation versus any potential negative effects.”Goin’s current funding builds on her previous work, which found water fluoridation was not associated with small-for-gestational age or preterm births. She is now exploring whether fluoride is associated with gestational diabetes.Malin added that it’s a sign of “progress” that the studies can be discussed: “Over a decade ago, to even ask the question of whether optimally fluoridated, or the concentration in drinking water, could be impacting neurodevelopment was quite controversial.” More

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      We must defend elective abortions, not just the most politically palatable cases | Moira Donegan

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      A Kentucky woman known by the pseudonym Mary Poe recently filed a lawsuit against her state, seeking an abortion for what was once a banal reason: because she wanted one.Poe, who was about seven weeks pregnant at the time of the lawsuit’s filing, has since had an abortion out of state. But her attorneys argue that she still has standing to sue to overturn Kentucky’s two abortion bans – a six-week ban and a separate total ban – arguing that the laws violate the state constitution. This much, at least, is typical: lawsuits challenging abortion bans have sprung up across the country since Dobbs, with women and their families seeking to overturn bans, expand exceptions, or get some compensation from the state for the graphic, distressing, disabling or deadly outcomes that the bans have made them suffer.The US supreme court justices who voted to overturn Roe in Dobbs cited the surge in activist litigation around abortion – a product of conservative investment in anti-choice legal shops – as part of their reason for doing so. Surely this must be a contentious, controversial issue that the federal bench is ill equipped to resolve, the judges from the conservative legal movement reasoned – because look how many complaints the conservative legal movement has filed against it!This rationale was always disingenuous, but it has also been proved flatly wrong: Dobbs has not got the courts out of the abortion business. Instead, lawsuits over abortion have exploded. The anti-choice camp has pounced, seeking to further restrict abortion by banning pills; targeting reproductive rights advocates, abortion funds and sexual health educators; claiming rights for fetuses or embryos; or by asserting that men who father pregnancies have a right to keep women from terminating them.But the pro-abortion rights side has been busy with litigation, too. Women who have been put at great health risk or made to suffer terrible, painful complications as a result of bans brought a class-action lawsuit in Texas. Bans have been challenged over and over again – on religious liberty grounds, on the grounds of state constitutional provisions securing the right to make individual healthcare decisions, under a federal law that guarantees emergency room treatment for patients needing stabilizing care, and under state constitutional clauses guaranteeing liberty, due process and privacy.The Kentucky lawsuit is part of this latter camp. Mary Poe has cited Kentucky’s constitutional guarantees of individual rights to both privacy and self-determination, which she says have been violated by the bans. “I feel overwhelmed and frustrated that I cannot access abortion care here in my own state,” she said in a statement delivered via her lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union. “I am bringing this case to ensure that other Kentuckians will not have to go through what I am going through, and instead will be able to get the healthcare they need in our community.”This kind of desire for an abortion – the dignified simplicity of it – has been missing from much of the post-Dobbs abortion rights discourse. After the ruling, as trigger bans shot into effect across the country, clinics shuttered their doors, and scared women tried to discern their options, there was no shortage of tragic stories highlighting the brutality, indignity and gendered bigotry of the laws. But as the dust settled and members of the Democratic party, the major reproductive rights advocacy groups and the liberal legal movement surveyed the national scene, a consensus emerged that the face of the mainstream pro-choice movement would be the patient who experienced a medical emergency.Women who had suffered horrific medical complications became lucid, moving and highly sought after tellers of their own stories, explaining how abortion bans has risked their health: Amanda Zurawski, for example, was denied an emergency abortion at 18 weeks, subsequently went into septic shock twice, and one of her fallopian tubes was so scarred that it is now permanently closed, inhibiting her future fertility. Kate Cox was denied an abortion after discovering that her fetus has trisomy 18, a rare genetic condition which is incompatible with life, and which, because of Cox’s own medical history, also endangered her fertility and life.During her presidential run, Kamala Harris ran an ad featuring a woman identified only as Ondrea, who suffered a miscarriage at 16 weeks and was denied the standard care due to her state’s abortion ban. She developed sepsis and almost died. The ad features a shot of Ondrea in a bathroom, staring at her body in a mirror wearing only a sports bra. Her belly bears the scars of the emergency surgery that eventually saved her life – the surgery that she never would have had to have if it weren’t for the ban.It does not diminish these women’s bravery, their suffering, or the wrongness of what was done to them to say that they are only one small fraction of those who need abortions in America. These are married, middle-class women with wanted pregnancies; Zurawski and Cox are both white. Cox has spoken movingly about her hopes to meet her future child, a girl; in the ad that features Ondrea, she and her husband hold a baby blanket. These are women whose suffering at the hands of abortion bans has nothing to do with a refusal or distaste for heterosexual, married, middle-class life. Their suffering can be made visible precisely because they are so acceptable.Not so with Mary Poe. Poe may well be married, middle-class and white; from her statement, in which she talks about the difficulty of finding childcare, we can infer that she, like most abortion patients, is already a mother. But Poe is not suffering a physical emergency; she is not enduring any pain or medical misfortune that she can use to purchase social license. She is not, in other words, a woman whose claim to an abortion is based on a plea for mercy. She is merely a woman who seeks to be in control of her own life, one who believes that things like privacy and self-determination apply to her, too.“I have decided that ending my pregnancy is the best decision for me and my family,” Poe writes in her public statement. “This is a personal decision, a decision I believe should be mine alone, not made by anyone else.”This was not always a radical proposition. But in the post-Dobbs world, it has sadly become one.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More