The Department of Health and Human Services is moving to make adjustments to testosterone-therapy labels, reversing changes made over a decade ago that restricted availability for some men. With hormone drugs being hailed as yet another wellness drug, experts worry the requested adjustments could trigger a testosterone free-for-all.

Why is the HHS asking for revisions?

The Food and Drug ​Administration as of 2015 required testosterone therapy labels to state that the “safety and effectiveness of the treatment had not been ​established” in men with symptoms associated with idiopathic hypogonadism, an age-related condition “involving low testosterone levels without a known underlying cause,” said Reuters. Now the HHS is requesting that labels be revised to remove that statement. The HHS also wants to update information related to prostate cancer risk and revise warnings regarding enlarged prostates after reviewing new data and evidence on the safety and benefits of hormone therapy.

These updates could “pave the way for easier access to testosterone replacement therapy” for a wider subset of men, said CNN. During Men’s Health Month, the HHS is “putting science back at the center of men’s healthcare,” said HHS Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr in a press release.

What are the risks of lessening the barrier to testosterone therapy?

No matter the outcome of the suggested revisions, experts warn that patients should still have “in-depth talks with their doctors about whether testosterone therapy could be helpful for them,” and doctors should “complete thorough evaluations,” said CNN. Besides, taking a warning off a label “isn’t the same as saying every man should be on the medication,” Jamin Brahmbhatt, a urologist and men’s health expert at Orlando Health, said in an email to the outlet.

For a man who genuinely has low testosterone, the “benefits are real: improved energy, sex drive, mood, muscle and bone strength,” Brahmbhatt said of testosterone therapy. However, for those with normal levels that are just “chasing an improvement in health motivated by online influencers,” the risks “may not outweigh the benefits.”

While experts insist that testosterone is not just a lifestyle drug that “men take to build muscle and feel good,” it is “increasingly being marketed that way,” said Nature. Influencers and “podcasters such as Joe Rogan and his guests” have “sung the hormone’s praises” and “scores of testosterone clinics are popping up” globally.

People have always “wanted a fountain of youth,” said Landon Trost, a urologist, to the Houston Chronicle. Hormones, “since really the 1970s or even earlier,” were considered the magical pills to achieve that goal. Today, the hormone is “widely prescribed in ways that aren’t covered by insurance” and that don’t “always align with mainstream medical guidance,” said the outlet.

Relaxed scientific protocols and standards within the Department of Health and Human Services have led to an increase in clinics offering experimental stem cell treatments to parents of children with severe autism. Despite being technically unapproved by the Food and Drug Administration, parents are shelling out tens of thousands for treatments that claim to improve language and social skills and reduce problem behaviors.

Operating ‘beyond the bounds of FDA approval’

Although there is a lack of FDA approval and little evidence of its efficacy, stem cell treatments for autism are being steadily provided across the country. Children with autism “as young as 18 months old” are getting “unapproved stem cell treatments” at clinics in Florida, Texas and elsewhere, “part of a growing market operating beyond the bounds of FDA approval,” said The Guardian.

The procedure involves sedating a child before administering intravenous doses of millions of stem cells, “commonly derived from human umbilical cords harvested at birth,” said The Guardian. Sometimes the doctors providing the treatment have “no scientific expertise in autism or child development.” Instead, they have “entered the booming stem cell sector,” billing the procedures as “regenerative medicine” for children, “some of whom have severe disabilities.”

As stem cell clinics “multiply across America,” they are “finding an influential ally in the U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,” said The Guardian. Kennedy’s influence could lead to new policy, said Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist and unofficial watchdog of stem cell clinics, to the outlet. The FDA has not taken action in the last 18 months. This could mean a “big change coming from the FDA very soon, backing off oversight of birth-related stem cells.”

Several clinics prominently cite an early Duke University study involving 25 autistic children that “suggested possible improvements following umbilical cord stem cell infusions,” said Trial Site News. But a “larger and more rigorous follow-up trial” involving 180 children failed to “demonstrate significant improvements in core autism symptoms compared with placebo controls.” Similar results emerged from a “placebo-controlled study conducted by Sutter Health.” This has led researchers to conclude that the “evidence does not currently support routine use of stem cell therapies for autism outside formal clinical research settings.”

Up until now, Americans seeking stem cell therapies for autism have looked abroad to places where they are approved and federally regulated or operating in grey areas. There is a flourishing multibillion-dollar industry of “stem cell tourism” in places such as “Mexico and Panama” and “as far afield as Abu Dhabi,” said The Guardian.

But most European countries limit the use of stem cell injections to clinical trials, and they are not an approved treatment for autism. In January, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that stem cell therapy cannot be used as a clinical treatment for autism spectrum disorder, making it clear it is “not only unethical but amounts to medical malpractice,” said Indian network NDTV.

When ‘hope outpaces evidence’

The biggest lesson from this story is “not political,” said Trial Site News. “It is human.” Parents seeking unsanctioned stem cell therapies are “not irrational.” Most are “navigating difficult realities” with “limited options and enormous responsibility.” The danger emerges when “hope outpaces evidence.” The appropriate response is “neither unquestioning enthusiasm nor reflexive dismissal” but rather “rigorous clinical research, transparent reporting, long-term safety monitoring and honest communication with families.”

After RFK promised to find a cure for autism last year, some people were “appalled and fearful,” clinical social worker Jennifer Cork said at Psychology Today. Plenty of families whose children require substantial support, however, were “relieved that someone in a position of power was finally talking about their struggles.” The issue is that these families “don’t need untried, expensive treatments.” They need “affordable therapies, respite care and adequate accommodations that they don’t have to fight for.” They also need Kennedy to “remember that autistic people are human beings, not lab rats.”

Infecting yourself with internal parasites doesn’t sound like the best way to feel better but scientists have “engineered” the genes of hookworms to deliver medicine – and “it’s just crazy enough to work”, said ZME Science.

US researchers have genetically modified hookworms to produce and secrete specific antibodies. This is a “first step” towards creating “living pharmaceutical factories” that can deliver therapeutic proteins “directly inside the host”, they said in their study, published in Nature Communications.

Internal leeches 

The hookworm has “spent millions of years perfecting how to assure long-term survival inside a human host, and how to get molecules out of its body and into ours”, said senior author Makedonka Mitreva, from Washington University in St Louis, on EurekAlert.

They are like an “internal leech”, infecting upwards of 400 million people globally, mostly in tropical regions, said LiveScience. As they latch on to the inner wall of the gut to feed on blood, they release “anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressant compounds to prevent the body from flushing them out”.

Scientists have already noted that this “cocktail of compounds” produced naturally by hookworms could help treat some metabolic disorders. But the new study takes things further – by engineering in an extra molecule for the worm to secrete.

Mitreva and her team used CRISPR gene-editing technology to insert into a hookworm egg genome “a gene coding for an antibody known to counteract” the pufferfish poison tetrodotoxin, a lethal, weaponisable neurotoxin with no known commercial antidote. They then infected hamsters with the modified parasites, and samples taken later showed the hamsters had antibodies to tetrodotoxin circulating in their blood.

“It was like the perfect moment,” Mitreva told R&D World. Now “we can start embarking on hookworms being a two-in-one platform” because we’ve shown they “can not only deliver a drug, but produce that drug and deliver it”.

‘Internal allies’ 

The goal now is to use this technology on humans. In the future, we “could see these worms engineered to produce a variety of other medications and excrete them inside the human body”, said LiveScience. They could potentially provide long-term treatments for chronic conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease, or even protective treatments for military personnel exposed to chemical or biological threats. Mitreva’s study was, in fact, funded by the US Department of Defense with a view to developing a treatment for tetrodotoxin poisoning.

This is an “exciting” approach that “paves the way for all sorts of injection-free biologic drug delivery”, said ZME Science. It’s “tantalising” to think that “engineered hookworms could one day” be our “internal allies, providing continuous therapeutic benefits while living safely within a human host”.

The upcoming release of the UK’s first weight-loss pill, Wegovy, has been described as “game-changing” by a leading pharmacy provider.

“We’ve already seen record demand ahead of the expected launch”, said James O’Loan, chief executive of Chemist4U. With the majority of people expressing interest in the new obesity treatment not being previous users of weight-loss injections, this indicated that the new pill “could widen access to millions of people across the country”.

How does it work?

Made by Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk, the pill is an oral version of weight-loss medicine Wegovy, containing the same active ingredient, semaglutide.

Where GLP-1 injections “pass directly into the bloodstream, the pill has to first be absorbed through the stomach”. This is possible through “scientific innovation, creating a way of encapsulating semaglutide and shielding it from stomach acid”, said The Telegraph’s health and medical journalist David Cox.

As with injections, the Wegovy pill “mimics the effects of a gut hormone called GLP-1, released after eating, which regulates appetite and signals a feeling of fullness”.

The pill is taken daily, compared to the weekly injection, and comes in different doses which can be steadily increased each month.

How effective is it?

Early tests suggest it has a similar effect to injectable Wegovy. After 64 weeks, adults taking the pill lost an average of 14% to 17% of body weight, with about one in three people losing 20% or more.

Regulatory guidelines from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency state that only people classified as clinically obese, with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 30, or those who are overweight (BMI of 27-30) with at least one weight-related health condition such as high blood pressure or type 2 diabetes, will be eligible to receive the drug.

How much will it cost?

To start with, it will be available in the UK only on prescription privately and not free on the NHS. While exact prices are yet to be set, Robert Bradshaw, a superintendent pharmacist at Oxford Online Pharmacy, told The Telegraph he expects the Wegovy pill to “come in roughly at the same price as the injections”.

“I suspect the pill will be priced somewhere around about £80 to start with, progressing to £130 [for the intermediate dose], and maybe £160 for the top dose.”

With other drug companies developing their own weight-loss pills, however, “competition could also drive down the costs of treatment, as first-generation drugs, or those that offer slightly poorer top-line results, command lower prices”, said The Economist. Some government-funded health systems are likely to make “population-scale deals in the coming years, which could broaden access” further.

Are there any side-effects?

“These are similar whatever the version and related to levels of the drugs in the blood rather than how they are administered,” said Dr Mark Porter in The Times. Common side effects include “nausea and vomiting (slightly more common with the pill version), diarrhoea and/or constipation and abdominal discomfort, but these generally settle once people get used to the medicine”.

The much rarer but more serious side-effects “such as gallbladder problems (stones), inflammation of the pancreas (pancreatitis) and visual problems (optic neuropathy) probably remain the same as with injectables”.

But with the latest NHS statistics suggesting 66% of all people over 16 in England are overweight, and with obesity rates “continuing to spiral”, doctors are “optimistic that the emergence of GLP-1 tablets can serve as a major boost to public health”, said The Telegraph.

And globally, if generic semaglutide were made available to everyone with obesity and diabetes, it could save between 2.1 million and 3.1 million lives a year, according to one model, said The Economist.

If you have ever felt like you couldn’t stop eating your favorite sweet treats and savory snacks, that’s by design. The tobacco industry had a heavy hand in the growth of ultraprocessed food in the U.S. And despite no longer being involved, its marketing tricks remain.

A new addiction

Big Tobacco employed its tactics in marketing cigarettes to also market ultraprocessed food, according to a series of papers published in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH). In the 1980s, U.S. tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds made a “major entrance into the food industry” when they had “strong cash flows yet experienced growing scrutiny regarding their tobacco products,” said one of the AJPH papers. Investing in food and beverages was an attempt to improve their corporate image, so the team acquired several major brands, including Del Monte Foods, General Foods, Kraft, Nabisco and 7UP.

Tobacco companies “spent decades amassing research on how to make cigarettes more pleasurable and addictive with chemical additives” and “deliberately applied this knowledge to food manufacturing,” according to “internal company records,” said NPR. Thus came the rise of added sugars and artificial flavorings in food and beverages. These additives are known to be “hyperpalatable,” activating the same part of the brain as cigarettes or other drugs.

Along with changing the composition of the products, aggressive marketing tactics became the norm. Big Tobacco “applied the same strategies to developing light and reduced food products with the express goal of retaining customers who might otherwise stop consuming some of their products,” said lead paper author Tera Fazzino, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Kansas, to NPR.

The companies “divested from the food system from 2000 to 2007,” said the papers. However, their impact has been long-lasting. Ultraprocessed foods “now account for 70% of packaged foods in the U.S. and 62% of the calories in children’s diets,” said Fast Company. These foods have been linked to a variety of health problems, including obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

“Children are really, really vulnerable to this kind of messaging,” said paper author Laura Schmidt, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, to The Washington Post. “The goal is to hook the consumer at the youngest possible age because, as you grow up, they have instilled brand loyalty in you.”

Trying to quit

There have been growing calls for regulating the production and sale of ultraprocessed foods, notably as part of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again agenda. Last summer, for example, federal agencies “began a joint effort to define ultraprocessed food,” said Bloomberg. This definition could be “used on product labels in an effort to nudge consumers to reach for healthier items.” The ultimate goal is to implement labeling on the front of packaging that indicates what foods are ultraprocessed. But creating such a definition is not so simple, as it could “inadvertently ensnare some healthier items like yogurt.”

While Kennedy may be pushing back against ultraprocessed food, the Trump administration has made “policy changes that could exacerbate the problem,” said The Guardian. The administration also “failed to direct policy changes that could help, like redirecting government corn subsidies toward whole fruits and vegetables.”

But better monitoring could lead to needed changes. Countries might “consider establishing a baseline of ultraprocessed or hyperpalatable food availability in their food environments to monitor food system health,” said the papers. There may also be a “global need to consider regulation of multiple addictive products disseminated by tobacco companies.”

With many in the Trump administration pushing an anti-vaccine agenda, declining measles vaccination rates have forced scientists to reinvigorate the hunt for a drug that could fight the virus. While the FDA has not approved any measles drugs yet, researchers seem hopeful that a breakthrough is on the horizon.

Why are researchers revamping the measles drug search?

For a long time, the quest to create a measles drug was essentially dormant, as the virus “had been kept at bay in the United States for more than two decades thanks to a remarkably effective vaccine,” said The New York Times. But in 2025, amid anti-vaccine sentiment from the White House, a “series of outbreaks popped up in unvaccinated communities across the country,” marking the worst year for measles in the U.S. since 1991.

The outbreak led to a “‘very crowded’ hunt for new measles therapeutics that could prevent or treat infections,” said the Times. Currently, if an unvaccinated individual contracts the measles, doctors can “offer ways to manage symptoms, which often include fever, fatigue, cough and a hallmark blotchy rash,” said Science News. But they “can’t fight off the virus itself.”

How far away is an approved measles drug?

There have been several breakthroughs from various scientific groups, and many feel that FDA approval of a measles drug is imminent. At least one antiviral drug, GHP-88310, was recently shown to “help treat measles, croup and other related viral diseases that cause contagious and life-threatening respiratory infections,” said The Independent. The drug is the “most promising inhibitor” of this virus family that causes measles “we have encountered in years of research,” Carolin Lieber, a senior postdoctoral fellow at Georgia State University’s Center for Translational Antiviral Research, said in a statement.

GHP-88310, which is taken orally, could “offer a much-needed option to treat measles in the midst of increasing endemic transmission in the U.S. and throughout the world due to vaccine hesitancy,” said Drug Discovery News. The drug could provide an alternative to the typical measles defense mechanism, ring vaccination, in which “direct and social contacts around an infected person are vaccinated.” But with “increasing vaccine hesitancy in some population groups, ring vaccination is no longer a viable option in some communities.”

The success of the drug doesn’t necessarily mean it will become ubiquitous as a measles treatment, partially due to people’s feelings about the disease. “One of the biggest misunderstandings about measles is that it’s ‘not that bad,’” Kathryn Hastie, a structural virologist at San Diego’s La Jolla Institute for Immunology, said to Science News. The virus instead can “cause a range of complications that can severely impact people’s lives, including pneumonia and blindness.”

Another company, Saravir, is developing its own measles antibody treatment. The medication could be a “potential multi-billion dollar market opportunity,” Dr. Ronald Moss, Saravir’s CEO, told the Times. Moss estimates there are 44 million people in the U.S. and EU who are “uniquely vulnerable to measles,” and if even a small portion of that group is exposed, it’s a “pretty big population that we would want to protect.” Still, the antibody treatment and other measles drugs could be cost-prohibitive. If the “drug makes it through trials,” said the Times, Saravir “expects the infusions to cost roughly $2,500.”

The Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of bemotrizinol (BEMT) in sunscreens. The chemical has been used in European and Asian brands of sunblock for decades. BEMT can provide better sun protection and last longer while being less greasy on the skin.

New kid in the block

Sunscreens are supposed to protect against both ultraviolet A (UVA) and B rays (UVB). UVB is “high-energy radiation that is typically associated with sunburns and can cause genetic mutations that lead to skin cancer,” said Scientific American. UVA rays have also “increasingly become recognized as relevant for skin health,” and their “longer-wavelength radiation” can “penetrate deeper into the skin than UVB, breaking down the skin’s structure and creating harmful, skin‑aging molecules.” Unfortunately, while most U.S. sunscreens are effective against UVB radiation, they “provided significantly lower UVA protection with the average unweighted UVA protection factor just 24% of the labeled SPF,” said a 2021 study.

BEMT, though, is capable of ”protecting against both ultraviolet A and B rays while not leaving white streaks associated with mineral-based sunscreens,” said The Associated Press. The ingredient is “generally recognized as safe and effective for use in sunscreens by adults and children 6 months of age and older,” said the FDA. “For too long, American consumers have been applying sunscreen and believing they were fully protected, not knowing that their product was delivering far less UVA protection than the label implied,” Alexa Friedman, a senior scientist at the Environmental Working Group, said in a statement.

Screening issues

There have been many efforts to get the government to approve new sunscreen ingredients, but they were “bogged down for decades by the FDA’s bureaucratic system for updating its lists of safe nonprescription drug ingredients,” said the AP. Bemotrizinol’s approval marks the “first ingredient to go through a streamlined process authorized by Congress in 2020.”

Sunscreen is an important step in preventing skin cancer, but there has been a mounting anti-sunscreen movement “amid an increasing distrust of the medical establishment and a desire by some for natural alternatives,” said The Washington Post. Much of the concern has surrounded chemical sunscreens, which get absorbed into the skin. In 2019, scientists from the FDA found that these sunscreens’ ingredients can stay in the body at unsafe levels after just one day of use. Bemotrizinol is “broad-spectrum and far more stable, so it doesn’t break down in the sun,” said NBC News. It “also has low levels of absorption into the body.”

What the US is trying to do in Kenya reeks of “neo-colonialism”, said The Daily Nation (Nairobi). To protect Americans from the deadly Ebola outbreak that is thought to have already killed at least 91 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the Trump administration has decreed that no one with the disease may enter its borders, even if they’re a US citizen. Any American unlucky enough to have contracted the virus in DRC should instead be sent for treatment hundreds of miles away to a specially commissioned Ebola health centre in Kenya.

Cue outrage in Nairobi. “Kenya is NOT America’s biohazard dumping ground,” fumed a spokesman for one of Kenya’s doctors’ unions, echoing widespread fury at the proposal to set up a 50-bed quarantine facility at Kenya’s Laikipia Air Base. And hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Nanyuki, the town closest to the air base, fearing the disease might spread to their community. They blocked roads and set fire to tyres, and police had to fire tear gas to disperse them.

According to some reports, two people were shot dead. Yet despite the uproar, and a temporary court order blocking the site’s construction, Kenya’s President William Ruto has vowed to press ahead with it.

Potentially ‘catastrophic’

The debacle in Kenya is far from the only mistake the US has made over the Ebola crisis, said The East African (Nairobi). “Epidemics are best fought collectively”, but under Trump the US has withdrawn from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and shut down USAID, scuppering the international response needed to stem the current outbreak, which has now spread to Uganda.

Trump’s decisions have been disastrous, said Craig Spencer in The New York Times. Over the past year, critical surveillance networks in DRC have been dismantled, with the result that US officials only learnt of the first Ebola death a month after it happened, making it inevitable that the outbreak would turn “catastrophic” in scale.

To put this in context, the world’s worst-ever Ebola outbreak, which broke out in Guinea in 2014, went on to kill 11,300 and infect 28,600 others. That outbreak was first detected when there were around 40 to 50 cases; for this one, that number was 400 to 500. And to make matters worse, rapid tests and vaccines do not exist for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola that is behind this latest epidemic.

“We are not getting ahead of this virus. We are running after it,” said Denis Mukwege in Le Monde (Paris). It’s already the third-largest outbreak in history, and could well become the deadliest ever.

Deep mistrust

The challenges facing teams on the ground are immense. For a start, the epicentre of the outbreak is war-torn eastern DRC, where conditions make contact-tracing almost impossible. And as the US has cut aid to the DRC from $1.34 billion in 2024 to just $428 million in 2025, local responders have “far fewer resources” than in any comparable recent crisis.

To add to the crisis, front-line health workers are “deeply” mistrusted by the local population, said The Economist. Look what happened two weeks ago in the small town of Mongbwalu in northern DRC, where a group of young men made four different attacks on the local hospital in a bid to retrieve the body of an Ebola victim for burial. The day before that, townsfolk had torched an isolation unit.

The crucial requirement is for the response to be consolidated under a single actor, just as it was for the 2014 outbreak when the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) took charge, said Anthony Banbury in The Washington Post. Congolese health workers and international NGOs have done an excellent job so far, but the lack of coordination has been a serious hindrance. “It is like going to war with scattered, independent military units, but no central headquarters directing the overall effort.”

In the absence of a body like UNMEER to devise and oversee a strategy for containing the outbreak, this epidemic could “spin out of control”. And then the world would be in real trouble.

The size of the global beauty and personal care market is astounding and is expected to approach $700 billion in 2026. From scented shampoos festooned with exotic oils to anti-aging creams and blemish-removers, those who can afford them seem to have a bottomless appetite for new products. Discerning consumers, however, may notice small but significant differences in ingredient lists depending on whether their purchases are made in the European Union or the United States.

These differences may look random but reflect longstanding differences in public health philosophies. “The EU tends to act on early signals, animal studies, preliminary lab findings, and the U.S. believes in waiting for real-world evidence before restricting anything,” said Ashley Fike at Vice. Still, the scope of the beauty market means that regulators need to stay vigilant even after bans are issued. Consumer Reports, for example, found methylene chloride in a number of hair dyes that the company tested in April 2026, despite the chemical being banned in the U.S. for cosmetics products since 1989.

Here are six prominent examples of beauty products and ingredients the EU has prohibited that remain legal in the U.S.

Coal Tar Dyes

Unlike many of the substances on this list, coal tar dyes are exactly what they sound like — or at least they were when they were invented. They are “mainly derived from petroleum nowadays, but they have retained their original name,” said Consumer Reports.

The FDA “must approve these color additives for use” in most beauty care products, although a loophole still exists for hair dyes, “which do not require FDA approval as long as the product includes a special cautionary statement and directions for a preliminary skin test,” said Consumer Reports. Hair dyes have been linked to increased risk of a number of different cancers, “including uterine and breast cancer, as well as the formation of ovarian tumors,” said the Environmental Working Group.

Formaldehyde and formaldehyde-releasing preservatives

Formaldehyde is a commonly used ingredient in nail polishes, hair straighteners and even some liquid baby soaps in the United States. In liquid baby soaps, consumers may find these formaldehyde releasers in ingredient lists: DMDM hydantoin, quaternium-15, diazolidinyl urea, imidazolidinyl urea, bronopol and sodium hydroxymethylglycinate.

Yet these ingredients are typically found only in trace amounts in baby soap products. “Maybe the greatest benefit of fearmongering about formaldehyde in shampoo is to make mommy breathless,” said Joe Schwarcz at McGill University. The chemicals, in the end, are found in higher concentrations in products like hair gels and dyes. Some states are running ahead of the federal government on this front, with Washington banning the use of formaldehyde-releasing chemicals in 2025.

Hydroquinone

Hydroquinone “works by decreasing the production and increasing the degradation of melanin pigments in the skin” and thereby “increasing the risk of skin cancer,” said the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. In the U.S. it is mostly used in skin-lightening products purchased mostly by people of color, making its continued legality especially problematic.

The EU has banned all use of hydroquinone in cosmetics, while the U.S. has required a prescription to access such products since 2021. As with many other such ingredients, it is relatively easy to acquire them without a prescription if you know where to look. Regulators promised to “take action against those continuing to market these potentially harmful and illegal OTC products,” said the FDA.

Parabens

Parebens are “chemicals known for their preservative and antimicrobial properties” that “protect products from the things that shorten shelf life, such as yeast, bacteria and mold,” said the Cleveland Clinic. Just as the United States has more permissive rules governing these items’ use in food products, so too are parabens more likely to be found in beauty products in the U.S. versus the EU.

Parabens that are banned in the EU include isopropylparaben, isobutylparaben, phenylparaben, benzylparaben and pentylparaben, while others like propylparaben and butylparaben are allowed only under strict concentration limits. As for the U.S., we “do not have information showing that parabens as they are used in cosmetics have an effect on human health,” said the FDA.

Phthalates

Phthalates are “typically colorless liquids used to make plastics more flexible and resilient,” said the Centers for Disease Control. Some studies suggest that these chemicals can “disrupt hormones and damage the reproductive system,” said the Environmental Working Group.

The EU has banned the use of dibutyl phthalate (DBP) and diethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP) in cosmetics and personal care products. You can find phthalates in a number of products in the U.S., including nail polish removers and scented soaps. Critics charge that the U.S. has largely allowed the beauty and personal care industry to regulate itself. U.S. government regulators insist they don’t “have evidence that phthalates as used in cosmetics pose a safety risk,” said the FDA.

Triclosan

Triclosan is an “antimicrobial agent found in a wide variety of antibacterial soaps and detergents, as well as in many deodorants, toothpastes, cosmetics, fabrics and plastics,” said the Campaign For Safe Cosmetics. There is also evidence that it is an “endocrine disruptor and impacts thyroid function and thyroid homeostasis.”

The chemical remains an ingredient in countless products from whitening toothpastes to eyeshadows, although the FDA did ban its inclusion in household soap products in 2016. Companies can still include triclosan in over-the-counter antiseptic after going through a premarket review process with the FDA, and the chemical can be used without restriction in cosmetics and toothpastes. In the EU, triclosan is completely banned in cosmetics as of 2025, and products containing it “can no longer be made available on the European market,” said the Obelis Group.

For the people of Gaza, “fear is no longer linked only to what falls from the sky”, but also to “what crawls from below”, said Prospect.

Rats and other rodents have “taken over everything in a frenzy” and, with summer approaching, their numbers are expected to soar even higher.

Physical and psychological threats

A “plague” of rodents is “terrorising” the area, said the Financial Times, as rats and weasels “chew their way into tents, biting children and contaminating food”. A Unicef spokesperson who visited Gaza this month said rodents are becoming “a huge, huge problem because of accumulated rubble everywhere”.

The threat they pose is more than psychological. Rats transmit diseases through urine and waste, causing fever and other illnesses. Diabetic patients are particularly vulnerable to rodent bites, as they may not feel it happening and serious complications can occur.

More than 72,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s war in Gaza, and rats began “eating human bodies under the rubble”, Samah al-Dabla, who was displaced from Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, told Al Jazeera.

Rats are now appearing in the tents where many Gazans live. Al-Dabla has tried to buy rat poison but the prices are too high and she already struggles to afford enough food for her family. Any food she manages to obtain tends only to attract more rats.

Mounting problem

Dr Ayman Abu Rahma, director of preventive medicine at Gaza’s Ministry of Health, told Al Jazeera that the problem has three main causes: damage to sewage systems, decomposing bodies under the rubble, and the amount of rubbish building up in the territory. Gaza City’s main landfill site is a “breeding ground for rodents in a densely populated area”, said Al Jazeera.

Local officials want to convert waste into organic fertiliser, but the war has destroyed much of the equipment needed for such a process.

The urgency is clear: rubbish dumps are located close to tents in displacement sites, creating serious “health hazards that will increase as summer temperatures rise”, humanitarian officials and residents told the Financial Times.

Cogat, the Israeli Ministry of Defence body that monitors aid access to Gaza, said that “nearly 170 tons of pesticides and thousands of traps for rats, mosquitoes, and other pests have been brought into the Gaza Strip in recent weeks”.

But Salim Oweis, the Unicef spokesperson who visited Gaza, said the amount allowed in is “barely enough for a few weeks” and “the whole of Gaza” is affected.

A needle-free universal vaccine may soon be on the horizon. Scientists have successfully run the first trial, which showed the vaccine can safely elicit an immune response to several viruses. But more research is needed before it’s approved for widespread use, so larger trials are now planned.

How was the vaccine developed?

This universal vaccine is the first human-tested inoculation to have its active component designed by computer simulations, according to a study published in the Journal of Infection. The vaccine has an AI-created “super-antigen,” a “protein that mimics shared features across multiple coronaviruses, rather than targeting a single specific strain, which can trigger the body’s immune system to fight a broad array of pathogens with those base characteristics,” said Euronews. Researchers “used all the available genetic sequence data for Sarbeco coronaviruses,” which are “zoonotic viruses that primarily circulate in bats and can jump to humans or other mammals.” They then “applied machine learning to create the super-antigen.”

“Viruses like influenza, coronaviruses and the Ebola group are evolving continuously, and by the time vaccines are rolled out, they may be poorly matched,” Saul Faust, a professor at the University of Southampton and the study’s chief investigator, said in a news release. But this “new class of universal vaccines are future-proofed,” as they “not only protect against many variants simultaneously but potentially against related viruses that haven’t yet emerged.” The universal vaccine can therefore curb outbreaks and even prevent future pandemics.

The vaccine is also needle-free. It’s administered through a microfluidic jet, which “uses a high-pressure, hair-thin stream of liquid to push vaccine blueprints directly into skin cells,” said Sky News. Without needles, it has greater “global applicability by reducing volume requirements, eliminating sharps waste and improving uptake in settings where needle-based administration is a barrier,” said Euronews. And it also doesn’t have to be kept as cold as traditional vaccines, making it “well-suited for use in low- and middle-income countries and in rapid-response scenarios.”

Is it effective on humans?

The vaccine has already shown promise in humans. The first clinical trial was conducted with 39 volunteers, and it was “well-tolerated at all four doses with no significant safety concerns elicited,” said the study. It also “triggered immune responses in the volunteers not only to SARS-CoV-2 and SARS but to related bat viruses that could potentially jump from animals to humans and cause future pandemics,” said the release.

However, the “magnitude of the response was limited and did not increase predictably with higher doses,” though this is likely influenced by prior Covid-19 exposure and vaccination history among participants, said the study. A larger Phase 2 trial will “next assess the vaccine’s ability to induce immune responses in a wider and more diverse population and confirm that it generates strong, broadly protective immune responses,” said the release.

The clinical trial proves the success of a whole new way to create vaccines. The use of AI “could protect against future emerging virus threats” and reduce the “need for frequent reformulation, which is a fundamental limitation of current vaccines,” said the release.

The old vaccine development system was like a “dog chasing its tail,” study lead Jonathan Heeney, a researcher from the University of Cambridge’s Lab of Viral Zoonotics, said in the release. “We can escape the constant cycle of chasing the virus variants circulating in humans and updating the vaccines to try to catch up.”

‘Flu vaccines should not be this hard’

Katherine J. Wu at The Atlantic

In a “typical year, the process of bringing a new seasonal flu shot to market is one of the United States’ most predictable vaccine routines,” but this is “not a typical year,” says Katherine J. Wu. The job would normally “fall to the CDC’s expert vaccine advisory panel, known as ACIP, which guides the agency’s recommendations,” but “currently, no functional ACIP exists to guide this autumn’s immunization campaigns.” This “could further undermine ACIP’s role as a key scientific check on government policy.”

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‘How women are shaping Minnesota’s cannabis industry’

Clemon Dabney at The Minnesota Star Tribune

Cannabis legalization “created a market in Minnesota. Women are helping create its culture,” says Clemon Dabney. While women are “still underrepresented in cannabis ownership,” the “women who are launching dispensaries across the state” are “doing far more than opening stores.” These women are “claiming space in an industry where they have too often been overlooked, underestimated or asked whether a man is really behind the business.” They “are setting the tone for what this market becomes.”

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‘Is Britain getting a new prime minister?’

Eliot Wilson at The Hill

In “America, changes of leaders are predictable,” but “in Britain, it is more nuanced,” says Eliot Wilson. It is “impossible to predict whether Sir Keir Starmer will still be prime minister at the end of this year, this month or perhaps even this week.” There is “no bar to a party in office changing its leader, who then becomes prime minister.” Will the United Kingdom “have a new prime minister by autumn? Yes. Or possibly no.”

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‘AI leaders are cosplaying James Bond villains’

Gautam Mukunda at Bloomberg

“Shark Tank impresario Kevin O’Leary wanted to build data centers on 40,000 acres in rural Box Elder County, Utah,” the “latest battle in the war that might determine the future of artificial intelligence,” says Gautum Mukunda. AI “might unleash miracles of productivity, cure cancer or make energy too cheap to meter,” but it “can’t do any of those things — or at least it can’t do them in the United States — if the public rejects the technology.”

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Spinal-cord injuries are “notoriously difficult to treat,” said Rhys Blakely, science editor of The Times. But Zurich-based researchers think a solution may be in sight: injectable microrobots.

When the spinal-cord is damaged, recovery is often limited: nerve-fibre regrowth can be hampered by scarring, and the nerve cells usually cannot regenerate on their own. But studies by a team at the Multi-Scale Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich suggest that microrobots, made from stem cells with magnetic nano-particles, could “coax” these nerve cells to repair and regenerate.

The studies were carried out in a lab on zebrafish and mice, so there is “still a long way to go” before the microrobots can be tested on humans. But the results are promising, and scientists the world over are intrigued by the idea of “microscopic repair crews, guided by magnets”.

‘Near-complete recovery’

The decision to build this “fleet of living machines” came after other experimental treatments had fallen short, said Blakely. Attempts to inject immature nerve cells into the injured area, then implant electrodes to stimulate them to develop, had failed.

So the Zurich robotics team engineered microscopic machines about six micrometers wide – smaller than a red blood cell. Each one combines a neural progenitor cell (a spinal stem cell) with a cluster of customised nanoparticles. These nanoparticles have two layers: one is sensitive to magnetic fields, so the microrobot can be guided by a magnet; the other turns magnetic signals into electrical pulses. This “lets scientists steer the cells and then coax them, electrically, into maturing into new nerve tissue”.

Millions of these microrobots were needed during the animal trials. First, they were injected into injured zebrafish larvae and, in three days, the larvae were exhibiting “near-complete recovery of swimming and exploratory behaviours”, according to the study published in Nature Materials. Then, when tested on mice with severed spinal cords, the microrobots “promoted neural differentiation, and resulted in substantial improvements in motor function within four weeks”.

‘Reproducible and scalable’

Further research is needed before these microrobots can be tested on humans but the Zurich team is already thinking about ways they can be used in other medical settings. “The reproducible and scalable production of microrobots using our lab-on-a-chip system demonstrates” that there is a great deal of “application potential”, said study leader Salvador Pané i Vidal. With adaptations, the microrobots could be used in wound healing, and to make cardiology and oncology treatments “safer, more controllable and more effective”.

Different microrobots have already been shown to be successful in other areas of medicine, said Healthcare in Europe. Formed in droplets, they are effective at “precision-targeted drug delivery”, outperforming IV-delivery on the amount of drug than reaches the target tissue.

‘India is losing its economic edge’

Sadanand Dhume at The Wall Street Journal

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi “faces a painful reality check: his promise to modernize India’s economy hasn’t panned out,” says Sadanand Dhume. The country “faces a rapidly weakening rupee, dwindling net foreign investment and worries that artificial intelligence will take a wrecking ball to the information technology industry.” Instead of “assuming that the world wants to beat a path to India, the government should emulate countries like Vietnam that ruthlessly focus on being more business-friendly.”

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‘We’ve come too far to let AIDS win’

Elton John and Bill Frist at USA Today

Thanks to “American leadership and extraordinary global cooperation, despair has given way to hope and action,” as “we are closer than ever to ending AIDS,” say Elton John and former Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). The “bipartisan President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has saved more than 26 million lives,” but the U.S. State Department should “consider doubling their rollout plan so resources can reach more communities without delay and to reengage community health workers.”

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‘As we approach July 4, the capital is, fittingly, a mess’

Jackie Calmes at the Los Angeles Times

One month “out from America’s celebration of its 250th birthday, the national capital is a mess,” says Jackie Calmes. This includes “sites central to the pilgrimages that millions of Americans make each year to Washington.” It’s “all about Trump,” who “sees only a site for self-glorification.” This is “hardly the adulatory message appropriate to a people who, by the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, renounced a king and went on to create a democratic republic.”

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‘To be a better negotiator, learn to live a little’

Attia Qureshi and John Richardson at Time

Negotiation is a “skill — one most of us haven’t learned or practiced. Most of us, most of the time, just aren’t very good at it,” say Attia Qureshi and John Richardson. There are a “lot of components that go into a successful negotiation. But before you can use most of those strategies, you need to get the other person’s attention.” Start by “pushing that reciprocity button and watching for any changes in the other person’s reactions.”

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What happened

New World screwworm, a deadly flesh-eating parasite, has been confirmed in a calf in south Texas, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said late Wednesday. It was the first case of the fly-borne parasite found in U.S. livestock since 1966.

Who said what

Screwworms are “parasitic flies whose females lay eggs in open wounds” on “any warm-blooded animal,” hatching hundreds of larvae that “use their sharp mouths to burrow through living flesh, eventually killing their host if left untreated,” Reuters said. Human cases are “rare,” and the fly “poses no food safety issues.”

The U.S. has been preparing for the parasite’s arrival, sealing the U.S. southern border to livestock since screwworms were found spreading north through Mexico in 2024. If “more screwworms are found” in the U.S. beyond this one case, it “could devastate the American cattle industry,” The New York Times said. The nation’s cattle herd is “already at its smallest since the 1950s,” The Wall Street Journal said.

What next?

The USDA is “taking immediate action” to “contain” and “eradicate this case,” said Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, including forming a 12.4-mile “infested zone” quarantine around the calf, increasing monitoring and releasing millions of sterile New World screwworm flies to shrink the population.

A class of synthetic drugs called orphines is throwing a new wrench into the ever-evolving opioid crisis in the United States. These drugs have tenfold the potency of fentanyl and have led to numerous overdose deaths in 2026. Experts say removing them from the streets, or even identifying them, could be extremely difficult.

What are orphines?

They are a “class of opioids that was created in the 1960s,” said The New York Times, as part of a project to find “rapid, safe pain relievers for surgery.” Orphines were developed by Paul Janssen, a Belgian doctor, the same man who originally synthesized fentanyl. It was soon discovered that “orphines had life-threatening side effects such as acute respiratory depression and were highly addictive,” which halted their development.

Orphines are generally considered to be at least “10 times more powerful than fentanyl, even in quantities no greater than a few sand-size grains,” said the Times. Like fentanyl, orphines can be “lethal with stunning speed, with victims slumping over abruptly, respiration shutting down, chest walls rigid.” Naloxone, a drug that reverses the effects of opioids, is effective against orphine, but “numerous doses may be required, many more than the one or two doses typically needed for fentanyl.”

Why are they prevalent now?

Orphines started to become ubiquitous among street drugs in the “wake of global crackdowns on fentanyl,” said the Times. The “emergence of orphines appears to follow regulatory actions targeting fentanyl analogues,” said the industry outlet Pharmacy Times, forcing dealers and users to pivot to new drugs. Most experts “believe the drug is produced at scale by international, multilevel drug distribution networks, likely originating from regions like South Asia or China,” and is then funneled to the U.S., said The Independent.

By the end of January 2026, orphine usage had been “detected in New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Illinois, Louisiana, Texas, Washington, Nevada and California,” said The Hill. Overdose deaths from the drug have been reported in nearly all these states. At least 41 deaths from an orphine called cychlorphine occurred in Tennessee alone between July 2025 and February 2026, according to the Knox County Regional Forensic Center.

What next?

Doctors and researchers are trying to find ways to stem the flow of orphines. Doing so is difficult because it is “not hard for labs to pump it out,” said The Hill. The drug isn’t simply coming from a bathroom brew made “from a couple of products or in the U.S.,” Timothy Wiegand of the American Society of Addiction Medicine told The Hill. It is coming from international “drug distribution networks, some of the cartels or other isolated networks.”

As orphines continue to plague U.S. cities, medical examiners have “become frontline drug detectives, pressing to identify the new substances causing deaths,” said the Times. Many are “coordinating with law enforcement and local health departments to swiftly warn communities about the latest killer in their midst,” though local medical examiners’ offices are often chronically underfunded.

These drugs represent a “dangerous shift in the opioid crisis,” Dr. Rachel Wirginis, an addiction medicine and family medicine physician at the Oklahoma State University Addiction Recovery Clinic, said in a press release. Physicians are “seeing increasingly powerful synthetic opioids that require rapid recognition and aggressive intervention to prevent fatal outcomes.”

What happened

A cancer drug decades in the making significantly extended and improved the life of patients whose metastatic pancreatic cancer had stopped responding to previous treatments, researchers reported Sunday in The New England Journal of Medicine and at an American Society for Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago. In a study of 500 last-stage pancreatic patients, those assigned Revolution Medicine’s daraxonrasib pill lived an average of 13.2 months versus 6.7 months for those undergoing chemotherapy. They also experienced fewer side effects.

Who said what

The “hotly anticipated” findings suggest researchers have “cracked one of the most stubbornly lethal cancers” by blocking mutated KRAS genes responsible for most pancreatic tumors, The Washington Post said. Daraxonrasib “ticks all of the boxes,” Dr. Rachna Shroff of the University of Arizona Cancer Center, who wasn’t involved in the study, told The Associated Press. “Having treated pancreatic cancer for 16 years, I actually started crying” at the results.

What next?

“Dozens of experimental drugs” targeting cancer-causing gene mutations are in development, stoking “optimism that this may be a turning point in the quest” for new treatment options, the AP said. Revolution Medicine is now testing daraxonrasib in earlier-stage cancer and in combination with other treatments.

The Trump administration’s moves to cut foreign aid and end ties with the World Health Organization could be making it more difficult to halt the latest Ebola outbreak in Africa.

Public health experts believe White House policies are “weakening critical networks” that respond to outbreaks in a “densely populated, politically unstable part of the world,” said Axios. The dismantling of U.S. support has “left the region dangerously exposed,” leading to the likelihood that Ebola was spreading “for some time” before it was detected, International Rescue Committee’s Heather Reoch Kerr said in a statement, per the outlet.

The Trump administration is pushing back against the criticism. The U.S. is “working with international partners” and “supporting response efforts” in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in a statement to Axios.

What did the commentators say?

“This is what happens when you defund Ebola prevention,” Sara Herschander said at Vox. There are “no vaccines or treatments” for the strain of virus at the heart of the current outbreak and the disease is spreading quickly “under the heavy shadow of U.S. foreign aid cuts” that “gutted” Ebola detection and response programs. Many of the experts and researchers who once would have guided the response are “simply not there anymore.” The U.S. has now pledged $23 million in emergency funding to Congo and Uganda, but “you can’t expect a bandaid to make up for the damage.”

The Ebola outbreak is a story of “institutional erosion,” Columbia University’s Thoai D. Ngo said at Newsweek. U.S. aid “helped build laboratory networks, train field epidemiologists, establish emergency operations centers” and other public health infrastructure that made it possible for epidemics to be “detected early and contained quietly.” That system is being “hollowed out,” which is short-sighted. “Global health security is domestic health security.”

The world “doesn’t have to fail” the test posed by Ebola, Michael T. Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said at The Washington Post. It is “not fair” to place blame for the outbreak at the “feet of the Trump administration.” This virus emerged in an “unstable area of Congo” and is able to avoid detection by Ebola tests designed to find more common strains. But the U.S. can choose to once again deploy its resources to help contain dangerous diseases, even when they emerge in foreign lands. That choice would protect Americans “at home and abroad from a highly lethal illness.”

What next?

American infectious disease experts “have been barred from speaking directly with the World Health Organization,” said CNN. The Trump administration-issued ban — which applies to officials at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — was in place for the recent hantavirus outbreak aboard a cruise ship but was “relaxed slightly” for the Ebola outbreak.

These restrictions “hobble quick cooperation” in disease response, health officials said, per CNN. The United States has “written off most of the institutions with global health,” Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International, told the outlet.

Vomiting, diarrhoea, sweating and a swollen face. Not the normal desired effects of a detox, but a kambo ceremony is not a normal detox.

Kambo is a poisonous secretion from an Amazonian tree frog, used by some indigenous people as traditional medicine. Its use as a wellness practice has spread to the US and Europe.

Last weekend it was reported that Kristian Trend, a 40-year-old wellness coach and cancer survivor from Leicester, had died after taking the frog poison. “He is believed to be the first British victim,” said The Times, but at least six deaths worldwide have been associated with kambo.

The substance is harvested from the defensive skin secretions of the Amazonian giant monkey tree frog. In the traditional medicine of some indigenous peoples of the Amazon, kambo “is applied to superficial burns on the skin of participants to produce an intense purging effect”, said Martin Williams, research fellow at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, on The Conversation.

‘Uncontrolled increase in fatalities’

Self-styled “kambo practitioners” have touted a range of supposed benefits for the purge and detox, including reduced anxiety, boosted energy and relief from chronic pain. Despite the documented side-effects, “the great majority of users of kambo anecdotally report positive physical, emotional and spiritual after-effects”, said Williams. Several celebrities have reportedly tried kambo, including actor Orlando Bloom, who told GQ that he had tried the treatment several times and claimed it left him with a “feeling of being clearer and wide open”. “You have this sensation of death and you kind of purge your body. But it’s incredible.” He did add, however, that “it was pretty brutal in terms of what it does to the body in the moment”, describing it as “coming out both ends”.

Kambo can also have more severe health consequences, with a paper published last year in Cureus, the online journal, warning of potential long-term issues. According to the scientists, the psychiatric effects were induced by hyperthermia and hyponatraemia, which were “often misinterpreted by participants as ‘astral travel’, instead of being recognised as potentially fatal conditions”. They added: “The widespread availability of kambo on the internet poses another pressing concern, contributing to an uncontrolled increase in fatalities.”

‘Absolute Western arrogance’

Governments around the world have acted to ban the poison. In Brazil, it’s illegal to sell or market kambo. In Australia, where two deaths after kambo rituals have led to coroner’s inquests, it was listed by the Therapeutic Goods Administration in 2021 as a Schedule 10 poison: a “substance of such danger to health as to warrant prohibition of sale, supply and use”.

Trend’s mother Angie told The Telegraph that she wants the treatment to be banned in the UK following her son’s death: “He was going to cleanse himself, that’s what he said to me. He was very spiritual. He took a lot of vitamins.”

Despite the dangers, the adoption of wellness rituals involving kambo continues to grow worldwide. “A lot of these Western wellness practitioners are exploiting people’s gullibility and exploiting those who are sceptical about Western medicine,” Prof Roger Byard, a forensic pathologist at Adelaide University, told The Guardian.

“But the techniques of shamans and healers in Indigenous communities have been used for hundreds of years and they have been trained to safely use these substances for certain, specific situations. To think that we can go into a community or spend a bit of time in another country and then take one of their time-honoured, cultural practices and then just take it for our own use is absolute Western arrogance.”

‘Plant viruses could threaten your coffee, chocolate and wine’

Anna E. Whitfield, Julie K. Pfeiffer and Terence S. Dermody at The Hill

Coffee, chocolate and wine are “woven into daily life and global economies,” say Anna E. Whitfield, Julie K. Pfeiffer and Terence S. Dermody. But the “plants that make these pleasures possible are increasingly under threat from plant viruses.” The “same forces driving viral outbreaks in coffee, cacao and grapes also threaten staple crops that underpin global food security.” Coffee, chocolate and wine’s “vulnerability is a reminder that plant health underlies far more of daily life than we tend to notice.”

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‘RFK Jr.’s move on peptides ignores serious risks’

Eli Thompson at USA Today

RFK Jr. “announced that he would force the Food and Drug Administration to reconsider a ban on peptides,” but as he “pushes to make these unregulated drugs easier to access, the trend is already here,” says Eli Thompson. These “substances, which were once only used by serious bodybuilders or in medical settings, are now part of everyday conversation.” This “shift is happening quickly,” and Americans “need to find a way to make peptides less attractive to young men.”

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‘As 2028 approaches, America needs ranked choice voting more than ever’

Jamie Raskin at The Guardian

Democrats “must act shrewdly to advance party rules of our own that promote majority rule, interracial political solidarity and the power of the voters,” says Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.). The “best tool to empower voters to make constructive choices among exciting new voices in such a crowded field is the mechanism of ranked choice voting.” Allowing “greater use of ranked choice voting in states where Democratic Party organizations choose it should be a slam dunk for DNC decision-makers.”

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‘Tokens are not the new billable hour (and confusing the two will be costly)’

Ravi Kumar S at Newsweek

For “decades, IT services companies were built on the simple production function of human effort, delivered through billable hours and the pyramid structure,” says Ravi Kumar S. But as AI “model interactions become more embedded into workflows, tokens emerge as the new production input reshaping the foundation of the services model.” If “token consumption continues to be treated as the primary metric, costs will scale linearly with demand without a corresponding return in business outcomes.”

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What happened

President Donald Trump on Tuesday spent more than three hours at Walter Reed Medical Center for his fourth publicly disclosed medical exam since returning to office last year. The White House did not release any details of the exam, but “everything checked out PERFECTLY,” Trump, who turns 80 next month, said on social media.

Who said what

Trump’s unusually frequent exams have put his health “under renewed public scrutiny after he has worked to dismiss concerns over his age and stamina,” The Associated Press said. He “frequently casts himself as more energetic and fitter than Joe Biden,” who left office at age 82 after “facing questions about his fitness for the job,” Reuters said.

Trump’s “health and fitness have been central to his political identity,” but as an “aging president, he now receives some of the same questions that dogged Biden — namely, whether he is mentally and physically fit” enough, The Washington Post said. “Independent doctors” have called the White House’s explanations for Trump’s bruised hands, neck rash, swollen legs and “occasional sleepiness” at meetings “insufficient.”

What next?

It was “not immediately clear whether the White House would release details” from Trump’s clinical exam to “support his claim” of good health, The New York Times said.

Among the many crusades in his quest to “Make America Healthy Again,” one target of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is antidepressants. Kennedy has long said that psychiatric drugs like SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) are harmful, including claiming they cause mass shootings.

Kennedy recently announced at a MAHA Institute mental health summit an initiative to help wean Americans off antidepressants. The announcement sparked a debate among experts over the campaign’s pros and cons.

Stigmatization and lack of access

Kennedy’s perspective on deprescribing SSRIs “really is an oversimplification,” Theresa Miskimen Rivera, the president of the American Psychiatric Association, said to NPR. The health secretary’s view “ignores the larger reality,” which is that “too many patients really cannot access timely, comprehensive care.” Rivera and the American Psychiatric Association support “any plans to better train healthcare providers to safely prescribe and wean patients off antidepressants.”

The health secretary has “no real interest in fixing structural problems that leave people with no choice but to use SSRIs,” Amanda Marcotte said at Salon. On the contrary, Kennedy has a “long history of talking about people on SSRIs in dehumanizing, often racist language” that implies “their actual problem is they’re lazy and need to just work harder — or even work for free.” The problem isn’t “lack of will but lack of access.” The only purpose of Kennedy’s rhetoric is to make it “easier to justify taking away their healthcare.” It is the “same old Republican playbook, just dressed up in a phony mask of compassion.”

There is a “legitimate clinical problem” at the center of Kennedy’s initiative to help Americans stop taking antidepressants, Jonathan Slater, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, said at Stat News. Deprescribing is indeed “understudied, undertaught and under-reimbursed.”

But the health secretary’s campaign “conflates that genuine clinical need with claims unsupported by evidence, and some that are actively dangerous,” said Slater. Redirecting patients away from medications is “only clinically responsible if the alternatives are accessible. They are not.” Patients on antidepressants deserve two things: an “honest conversation about whether they still need their medication” and a “system equipped to help them stop safely if they do not.” Right now, “we have neither the data nor the infrastructure to deliver that.”

Turning a blind eye to weaning difficulties

For decades, mainstream psychiatry “willfully blinded itself” to the “burden and severity of withdrawal and discontinuation-related difficulties” from antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs, Awais Aftab, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry, said to The New York Times. American Society for Clinical Pathology guidelines only “tinker” toward solutions and “generally recommend maintenance treatment for recurrent depression, bipolar I disorder and schizophrenia, ignoring controversies in these areas.” The guidelines assume that most people are “correctly diagnosed,” when in reality there is “widespread diagnostic chaos and decisions about maintenance are made under considerable uncertainty.”

Kennedy is correct that more “evidence-based care and therapies” should be available, Vera Feuer, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, said to NPR. Some of the health secretary’s recommendations are “completely reasonable.” Everybody should have access to a “detailed, careful assessment.” Prescribers should also not “feel pressured by parents and schools to instantly medicate behaviors that are due to other issues.”

In diagnosing “overmedicalization as a major problem,” the MAHA movement “gets something right,” Khameer Kidia, a physician and anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, said at The Boston Globe. However, the issue “doesn’t begin with physicians and our prescription pads.” As the opioid epidemic has shown, the “problem starts higher up.”

Drug companies have led the public to believe the “drugs corrected a chemical imbalance in the brain,” said Kidia. No such imbalance has been proven, and “many research studies show the drugs are only modestly better than placebos.” Now that so many patients are on SSRIs, “pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to get them to stop.” The problem with “MAHA’s approach to mental health” is the “overarching placement of responsibility with individuals” rather than the “exploitative systems that create poor mental health.” MAHA is “half right with the diagnosis,” but its “prescription conveniently ignores the root causes of the problems it has identified.”

Forty-two athletes, including swimmers, weightlifters and sprinters, will compete in Las Vegas on Sunday in the first Enhanced Games.

Little in sport has “caused as much controversy – nor provoked as many questions – as the Enhanced Games”, said BBC sports editor Dan Roan. “Those behind it claim it is here to stay, and could soon expand to more events and other disciplines.”

But there is another side to the spectacle of juiced-up competitors trying to beat the world record in their discipline. Earlier this year, the company behind the event, Enhanced, launched a range of personalised performance and longevity medicines to sell to the public.

What did the commentators say?

Proponents of the games say the aim is “to challenge sporting norms by allowing athletes to push their potential with legal drugs under strict medical oversight”, said Chris Kenning in USA Today. “The approach is, let’s not be naive and pretend it’s not happening,” said Enhanced CEO Max Martin. “Let’s just take what’s happening in the shadows, put it out in the open.”

But that’s not sensible, say some sports medicine experts. “It’s akin to me saying I’m going to make smoking safe by supervising you while you’re smoking,” Aaron Baggish, professor of medicine at the University of Lausanne, told Yahoo Sports.

Most critics though “overlook the fact that the Enhanced Games is making obvious what society has always quietly accepted”, said Byron Hyde, philosopher of science and public policy at Bristol University, on The Conversation – namely “that most people are willing to watch athletes risk harm when the entertainment is good enough”. Brain trauma is the “potential price of boxing entertainment”, so “why the outrage about pharmaceutical enhancement risks?”

For Baggish, the “primary concern” is the message the event sends to the public that using these substances when taking part in sports “is in any way, shape or form OK. That’s the really scary thing.”

That appears to be one of the goals of the organisers. Aron D’Souza, founder of the Enhanced Games, told The Independent in 2024: “This is the route towards eternal life.” The games will “bring about performance-medicine technologies that then create a feedback cycle of good technologies, selling to the world, more revenue, more R&D, to develop better and better technologies”. Ultimately, “it’s about being a better, stronger, faster, younger athlete for longer. And who doesn’t want to be younger for longer?”

But, said The Economist, “the real purpose of the games is to push the limits of what the public sees as the acceptable use of performance-enhancing drugs”. The event is taking place “at a time when concerns are being raised over the medicalisation of Western society”, said Roan. Social media and ‘looksmaxxing’ are being “blamed for fuelling demand for weight-loss injections, cosmetic treatments and performance substances”.

What next?

The Enhanced Games “speak to a vision of the future in which medicines, rather than being simply used to treat disease, can extend human longevity and enhance well-being”, said The Economist.

But on Sunday, the athletes involved will effectively be the guinea pigs for this idea, albeit ones who have “burned bridges, risked their future livelihoods or their health”. And with the launch of Enhanced’s consumer business, “more and more people may soon be wagering their bodies on a chance to roll back the clock”.

Two things are true: Cruise ships can be breeding grounds for disease. Americans love cruises anyway.

Expedition cruise lines “haven’t experienced any slowdown in bookings” following the deadly hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius, said The Wall Street Journal. Oceangoing travelers “generally understand the realities” of long boat journeys, Expedition Cruise Network CEO Akvile Marozaite said to the newspaper. Despite the scary headlines, industry experts “expect a record number of people” to take cruises this year, said The Associated Press. The sector “seems to be somewhat Teflon” to the bad publicity, Cornell University’s Robert Kwortnik said to the outlet.

What did the commentators say?

“Why would anyone go on a cruise?” Dave Schilling said at The Guardian. The Hondius drew worldwide attention, but a separate ship that was briefly quarantined with a rash of stomach flu cases was largely overlooked by the media. The stories are “piling up” about cruise ships being ocean-bound “fetid petri dishes.” There is not “one thing” a cruise offers “that isn’t available in the safe bosom of dry land.” Cruises will remain popular anyway. If Covid-19 “didn’t kill” enthusiasm for the excursions, “I think the industry is safe.”

People who criticize cruises are “wrong about nearly everything,” Nicole Russell said at USA Today. The hantavirus outbreak “won’t dampen my desire to go on a cruise.” There may be many stories of “terrible things happening on cruise ships,” but they are “worth the risk” because they can provide an “affordable, joy-filled family vacation.” Cruises, like life, are a “trade-off.” And life is “meant to be lived.“

“Do I think cruises are worth it, health-wise?” epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz said at Slate. The answer is a “bit complicated.” Cruises are “absolutely great places for illnesses to thrive,” but there is not a “great deal of evidence showing that infections are more likely” than on land. It is possible that people “just generally come into contact with lots of others on vacation.” Meyerowitz-Katz is considering taking his own family on a cruise. After weighing both the risks and benefits, “it doesn’t seem like the worst idea in the world.“

What next?

People planning to take a cruise should “practice great hand hygiene,” said CNBC. They should also “get up-to-date on your vaccines” before departing. And they should “keep a safe social distance” if illness rears its head. Best to stay clear of anyone who is coughing, “has difficulty breathing or is exhibiting fever,” Wellness Equity Alliance’s Dr. Tyler B. Evans said to the outlet.

The Hondius’ next voyage is already planned, said Forbes. After arriving in the Netherlands, the ship is to be “disinfected using chlorine and peroxide,” and the crew quarantined. Two scheduled voyages for the Hondius were canceled, but the plan “pending successful cleaning” is to sail in June from the Svalbard islands to the North Pole.

The MAHA movement, led by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been pushing for healthier food for schoolchildren, but the Trump administration’s budget cuts might make this difficult. Combined with a series of changing MAHA-adjacent nutritional guidelines, some schools are reportedly finding it hard to fund kids’ lunches.

Why are schools having trouble providing lunches?

A large part of the issue lies with the new MAHA health guidelines, which encourages people to “avoid highly processed foods and prioritize ‘high-quality, nutrient-dense’ protein at every meal,” said NPR. These guidelines form the “basis of federal nutrition standards that schools participating in federal meal programs must follow.” But many school districts “rely on processed, premade foods to feed their students, and protein is already the most expensive ingredient on the cafeteria plate.”

Currently, the government’s federal reimbursement rate for a free school lunch is about $4.70, which “must cover the food and the supplies, our labor and our equipment, deliveries and utilities, and the list goes on,” Stephanie Dillard, the president of the nonprofit School Nutrition Association (SNA), said in a congressional hearing. Many have “lauded the push toward scratch-made meals and more whole food options,” said Fortune. But these healthier foods are typically more expensive, and experts worry that trying to fit them into just $4.70 will “further strain schools already concerned with the future of their school lunch programs.”

The push for healthier meals is being juxtaposed with the White House’s decision to “cut funding programs that allowed schools to buy local food from farmers,” said NPR. The USDA has reportedly ended the “Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, erasing an estimated $660 million in funding” that was used to buy “unprocessed or minimally processed foods” for schools. The cuts come as nearly seven in 10 school administrators, 69.6%, don’t think the $4.70 reimbursement rate is “sufficient to cover the costs” of school lunches, according to an SNA survey.

Is there a solution?

Many experts are pushing for increased funding for school lunches, which could help offset the cost of their increasing expense. The “issue here is the operational reality of getting there with the current level of funding,” David Ortega, a professor of food economics and policy at Michigan State University, said to Fortune. “Not having enough staff, culinary training that comes with trying to do a lot of that more whole-food scratch cooking, the need for equipment and infrastructure — these are really operational issues that have to be addressed from a funding perspective.”

Enabling school districts to serve healthier foods is “what we’re trying to do,” Mara Fleishman, the CEO of the Chef Ann Foundation, a school-food-reform organization, told The Christian Science Monitor. But doing so “requires support. It requires the right equipment. It requires funding.” Districts should be “shown how to create varied menus, identify where they can spend more on higher-quality ingredients, reassess labor costs and acquire the proper equipment.”

Government officials deny that budget cuts are hurting school lunch programs. “Out of a multitrillion-dollar government budget, it’s not surprising the media can find examples of cuts instead of ignoring the larger issue that the Trump administration is fighting for farmers and real food more than any administration in history,” senior White House adviser Calley Means told Bloomberg. The USDA has announced a $20 million farm-to-table program grant for schools, describing it as “record-breaking,” Bloomberg said, even though this still leaves a “$640 million gap compared to what was cut last year.”

Rising Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are ringing alarm bells across a region still scarred by previous outbreaks of the highly contagious viral disease. The World Health Organization has declared a “public health emergency of international concern”.

At least 540 suspected cases and 131 suspected deaths have been reported by DR Congo’s health minister, and two cases have been confirmed in neighbouring Uganda. But the WHO’s initial sampling suggests the outbreak is potentially much more widespread.

And what makes this outbreak “extraordinary”, said the WHO, is that it’s caused by the rare Bundibugyo strain of the Ebola virus. This has a lower fatality rate (about 35%) than the more common Zaire or Sudan strains (up to 90% and 50% respectively) but there is no licensed Bundibugyo-specific vaccine or treatment – and the tests for it do not appear to work very well.

What did the commentators say?

Experts are alarmed that this outbreak “has been able to spread for weeks undetected across a densely populated ​area”, said Reuters. It took weeks to identify it as the Bundibugyo strain and then pinpointing cases was “slowed by limited diagnostic capacity”, with only six tests possible per hour.

The lack of a vaccine is why I am in “panic mode”, Jean Kaseya, the director-general of Africa-Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, told Sky News. And ongoing attacks by Islamic State-backed militants in Ituri, the province at the centre of the outbreak, are “restricting surveillance and rapid response operations”.

Ituri is “rebel-held territory”, close to “porous borders” with Uganda and South Sudan that communities cross constantly, said The Times. That’s certainly one factor that’s “making containment so difficult”. Bundibugyo is also “among the least studied of the Ebola strains”: this is only the third outbreak on record.

We reached a “critical moment”, said the BBC’s health correspondent James Gallagher. Most Ebola outbreaks are small but specialists are still “haunted” by the largest, which started in 2014 and killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa. This time, there is a “significant threat” not only to DR Congo and Uganda but also South Sudan and Rwanda. But that doesn’t mean we’re “in the early stages of a Covid-style pandemic”. The risk to the rest of the world “remains tiny”.

DR Congo has “extensive experience in dealing with Ebola outbreaks”, and its response is “significantly stronger today than it was a decade ago”, Daniela Manno, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told the BBC’s Gallagher. But recent US-led foreign-aid cuts have taken their toll. Containing the 2014 outbreak “relied on US leadership from USAID”, said Devi Sridharm, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, in The Guardian. But “the USAID team dedicated to Ebola-like diseases was cut by Elon Musk”. Since Donald Trump withdrew the US from the WHO, the organisation’s emergency-response budget has shrunk by 37%. UK foreign-aid funding has also “fallen to its lowest level in two decades”.

The worry “is less about this becoming a global pandemic” (unlikely, as Ebola only spreads through contact with infected body fluids), and more about “the devastation it can cause” to the region and its “already fragile” healthcare systems. But this is an “interconnected world”: “if your neighbour’s house is on fire, you don’t wait and watch; you help to put it out before the fire spreads to yours.”

What next?

The WHO is sending a team of experts to Congo and, on Friday, will host an emergency scientific consultation of researchers, clinicians, public health bodies and funders. “The cash-strapped organisation has already released almost $4 million (£3 million) to combat the outbreak,” said the BBC, “but much more may be needed.” Public health officials are also considering using a combination of the existing approved vaccines for the Zaire and Sudan strains.

But communities in the region “have little trust in government or external aid agencies”, said Sridhar. If Ebola spreads to a major urban hub, it will be “much more difficult to stop”.

“I don’t think that, in two months, we will be done with this outbreak”, Anne Ancia, the WHO’s representative for the DRC, told reporters in Geneva at the World Health Assembly. The 2014 Ebola outbreak took two years to end.

Are synthetic drugs new?

Lab-made or “designer” drugs have been around for decades. LSD is synthetic, and so is methamphetamine. But what’s new is the dizzying scale and variety of synthetic intoxicants and their increasing dominance of the drug market.

Traditionally, most illicit drugs have come from plants that are cultivated on a large scale, such as marijuana, opium and heroin from poppies, and cocaine from coca leaves. But those plant-based drugs are being supplanted—or adulterated—by synthetic stimulants, opioids, and cannabinoids made in clandestine labs that are far cheaper and easier for traffickers to produce and transport. They’re also far deadlier. Some 80,400 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2024, nearly 70% more than a decade earlier; synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl, accounted for nearly 68% of those deaths. Fentanyl, which is 50 to 100 times more potent than heroin, is now giving way to even deadlier compounds such as the 10-times more powerful cychlorphine. In Knoxville, Tenn., a national cychlorphine hot spot, at least 50 overdoses involving the drug have been confirmed in the past six months. “This is the modern drug epidemic,” said Bob DuPont, U.S. drug czar under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. “It’s like nothing that’s happened in the world before—anywhere.”

How many synthetic drugs are there?

More than 1,460 new psychoactive substances have been recorded by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime since 2013, tripling in just over a decade. And new compounds are popping up with staggering speed, leaving law enforcement scrambling to keep up. “Once a month or every other month, we’re encountering something that we’ve never seen before,” said Ed Sisco, a research chemist who tracks street drugs for the federal government. One reason traffickers keep inventing new drugs is to stay ahead of the law: the moment a compound is identified and made illegal, narcochemists—sometimes aided by artificial intelligence—tweak its molecular structure to get around the law. “Each time we get rid of one substance,” said forensic scientist Alex Krotulski, “they come up with something more potent.”

What are these new drugs?

They run the gamut. There are sedatives such as xylazine, street-named Tranq, an animal tranquilizer that can cause fleshrotting skin lesions and is frequently mixed with fentanyl. Last month, the CDC warned about the rise of medetomidine, or “Rhino tranq,” which is up to 200 times more potent and doesn’t respond to conventional overdose-reversal treatments like naloxone. There are hundreds of synthetic cannabinoids, such as K2 and Spice, sold at smoke shops and convenience stores across the U.S.; they can yield a weed-like high and can also cause agitation, delusions, seizures, kidney damage, and, in extreme cases, death. There are cathinones, stimulants modeled on MDMA that “hijack the dopamine system in the brain” and thus are “extremely addictive,” said Michael Baumann of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “There’s a reason why chemists would design these.” Nitazenes are an even bigger category.

What are nitazenes?

Developed as painkillers in the 1950s, this family of synthetic opioids was never approved for clinical use because of its staggering potency. Some nitazenes are so powerful that under 2 milligrams—the equivalent of a few grains of sand—can kill a person by shutting down breathing. Since they surfaced in the U.S. in 2019, the drugs have caused at least 2,000 overdose deaths. The newest worry is a different class of synthetic opioids called orphines, which include cychlorphine. Joe Guy, sheriff in McMinn County, Tennessee, an hour south of Knoxville, notes one issue common among synthetic drugs: wildly varying potency that makes ingestion a crapshoot. “One pill, one hit, can literally end your life,” said Guy. And because traffickers often use cheap new synthetics to boost narcotics such as fentanyl and heroin, or even substitute them for various pills, drug consumers very often don’t even know what they are taking. Authorities in Arkansas last week confirmed the state’s first known cychlorphine death: an unidentified man who took what he thought was an oxycodone pill, which was actually laced with the more powerful orphine. “This is mass-produced deception,” said Ted Brown, head of the Arkansas Crime Laboratory.

Where are these drugs coming from?

The federal government pegs the primary source as Mexican cartels using chemicals sourced from China. Other synthetic drugs come directly from China and sometimes India, and are cut and sold by small domestic operators. Efforts have been made to stem the flow of raw materials, but with unintended consequences. When China tightened controls on chemicals used in fentanyl in 2019, narcochemists researched alternatives and revived production of nitazenes. Last summer, China banned nitazenes—which may have led to the sudden rise of cychlorphine.

Is there a better way to respond?

On the street level, there are calls for wider distribution of naloxone, and for educating young people about the dangers that may lurk inside a pain pill or a bag of synthetic cannabinoids. On the enforcement front, there are moves to increase global cooperation to disrupt supply chains, stem trafficking, and identify emerging threats. To that end, the Biden administration in July 2023 launched the 160-nation Global Coalition to Address Synthetic Drug Threats; China has not yet joined the group. But some experts emphasize that the era of synthetic drugs underlines the need to address the root factors that make users seek out drugs, given the futility of targeting a supply that’s constantly expanding and shifting. “Today is the most dangerous time in the history of the world to be using drugs,” said Andrew Monte, who runs the Rocky Mountain Poison Center. “That’s until tomorrow, when there’s a new drug.”

No one should panic, but this is “certainly a worrying chain of events,” said Tara C. Smith in MS.now. Two weeks ago, news broke that three people aboard the Dutch cruise ship MV Hondius had died of suspected hantavirus, a respiratory disease with no cure or vaccine. The Hondius was eventually allowed to dock in Tenerife, Spain. But before the pathogen was identified, some 30 passengers had disembarked and flown home to 12 countries, potentially seeding the planet with a virus that kills 38% of its victims. A six-week incubation period means we don’t yet know the extent of the outbreak. But at least eight other Hondius-linked infections have been confirmed, and 18 Americans are being monitored, two at containment facilities in Atlanta—one of those passengers is symptomatic—and 16 in Nebraska.

“I hope it’s fine,” said President Trump. But Trump also hoped it would be fine in February 2020, when passengers on another ship, the Diamond Princess, started dying from Covid-19. And back then, we were still part of the World Health Organization—Trump ordered the U.S. out last year—and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wasn’t our health secretary. “We are in the hands of the madmen now,” said Charles P. Pierce in Esquire. “An outbreak of any disease more serious than Covid, and this country is in a world of hurt.”

This story is certainly “tragic,” said Lisa Jarvis in Bloomberg. The first two fatalities, a Dutch couple, were probably infected through exposure to rat droppings while bird-watching in Argentina. But “this likely isn’t the opening scene for a bigger, scarier movie.” The human-transmissible strain of hantavirus is not very infectious, requiring prolonged contact with someone already suffering symptoms. Standard public health measures have contained previous outbreaks, the worst being a 2018 outbreak in Epuyén, Argentina, in which 11 died. Experts say there’s little reason to fear the new cluster will “turn into anything bigger.”

Which experts? asked Zeynep Tufekci in The New York Times. Microbiologist Gustavo Palacios, who studied the Epuyén outbreak, is “baffled” by these reassurances. In Epuyén, a single guest at a birthday party infected five others in 90 minutes, and the widow of one victim infected 10 more people at his wake. These “super-spreader” events suggest the virus could spark a pandemic. We may have been spared in 2018 because Epuyén is an “isolated rural village in Patagonia.” The 2026 Hondius outbreak, by contrast, has already gone global and, as with the early days of Covid, global health leaders are erring on the side of reassurance rather than sharing, “accurately and loudly,” what little we know about this terrifying virus.

In the U.S., the response has been “sluggish,” said Apoorva Mandavilli, also in the Times. It took a week after WHO formally confirmed the hantavirus infections for the administration to hold its first briefing, and a month after the first death to set up a CDC task force. Hollowed out by Trump and Kennedy, our health agencies aren’t remotely ready for another pandemic, said Katrine Wallace in StatNews. Not so our post-Covid infrastructure of misinformation, that “network of influencers, conspiracy accounts, and partisan personalities.” They’re already spinning this outbreak as further proof that “scientists are corrupt, vaccines are the real threat” and hawking ivermectin from “the link in their bio.” It’s this new infrastructure, along with Trump’s vandalism of the old one, that will hurt us the most should another pandemic arrive. “And one will.”

What happened

The World Health Organization Sunday declared an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo a “public health emergency of international concern.” More than 300 suspected cases and 88 deaths have been reported, with at least one confirmed case in the rebel-held city of Goma and two others in neighboring Uganda.

There have been more than 20 Ebola outbreaks in the region since the deadly virus was discovered in 1976, but this is only the third caused by the Bundibugyo strain, for which there are no approved vaccines or treatments.

Who said what

This is not yet a “pandemic emergency,” the WHO said, but all indications “point toward a potentially much larger outbreak than what is currently being detected,” with “significant local and regional risk of spread.” The emergency declaration “indicates that the outbreak requires coordination among countries, given its risk of international spread,” Politico said.

What next?

A “handful of Americans” in the DRC “may have been exposed to suspected cases of Ebola,” and one or more with symptoms “may need to be medically evacuated,” The Washington Post said. “The risk to Americans is low,” said Satish Pillai at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

As the Iran war continues, food and vital medicines in the country are becoming increasingly scarce, said The Australian. The costs of some medicines “have risen by 400%”, and antidepressants and sleeping pills are reportedly being “dispensed without prescriptions”.

This is not unique to the Middle East, as other countries around the world face the threat of conflict, or suffer under pressures of economic and political repression. As mental health crises and resources continue to stretch, many fear the consequences could echo the fallout from the Covid pandemic.

A ‘kind of coma’

Some pharmacists in Iran have called the boom in antidepressants a form of “mass sedation”, said The Australian. These healthcare professionals believe that relaxing the strictness of distribution policy keeps the public in a “state of artificial calm” designed to “delay any popular uprising while the war continues”.

Access to the country’s black market has also been damaged since the start of the war. Built on sanctions, import shortages and “hoarding” by middlemen, the black market is “not new”. But with the joint threat of war and internet shutdown, the “shadow supply chain” has been significantly “disrupted”. As the war continues, Iran is stuck in a “kind of coma, caught between economic collapse and the dream of a better future”.

The rise in antidepressant use is part of a broader system to “doctrinise control of Iranians’ minds and bodies”, said Atlantic Council. Observers from abroad have “overlooked the concerted regime strategy to deliberately engineer this state of depression as a suppression mechanism”. By outlawing cultural events such as Valentine’s Day, “Chaharshanbe Suri (the festival of fire)” and “Shabeh Yalda (winter solstice)”, the regime has arguably “promoted gloom and hopelessness to the extent that citizens become paralysed and incapable of challenging the political status quo”.

Like Iran, Lebanon has been struck by the ongoing conflict, and has appeared to follow a similar pattern of “pushing anxious residents toward sedatives and sleeping pills”, said Y Net News. Though no official data has been released, news outlet Al-Akhbar, which has ties to Hezbollah, claimed that the “demand for sedatives had jumped by 300% since the fighting began”, said Y Net. This figure, though unverified, “points to a population under mounting psychological strain”.

Global impact

And in Cuba, economic and political crises present an “outlook that feels bleaker than the collapse of the Soviet Union”, said The Guardian. As a growing mental health crisis “envelops the island”, many citizens are “turning to prescription drugs” to cope with the US-imposed oil blockade, and still reeling from years of economic decline.

Cuba is stuck in a vicious cycle, as the economy shrinks – GDP has “contracted by 17% since 2019” – it means state pharmacies lie “empty”, while demand for their services increases. People are “leaving in large numbers”, which exacerbates the cycle further. In the last five years, “up to 20% of the population” has emigrated, which has in turn added to the “psychological load on those who chose (or were forced) to remain”.

In its ongoing campaign against Ukraine, Russia is experiencing a “spiral” of antidepressant use, said El País. The country has registered “record sales” of the medications every year since 2020. Last year’s total “nearly tripled pharmaceutical consumption” from 2019. In the same year, figures from Russian consultancy DSM show that after peace negotiations were “unsuccessfully reinitiated” in 2024, sales of antidepressants grew 36%. It appears the war, with its subsequent health crises, has had a “larger emotional impact on its population” than the Covid pandemic.

In the early 1950s, thousands of UN troops in Korea fell ill with a mysterious fever, said Chris Smith in The Spectator. Doctors suspected that a virus might be to blame – but it wasn’t until 1978 that a Korean scientist isolated the culprit in a mouse, and named it after a nearby river, the Hantan.

He also showed that hantaviruses, which are carried by rodents, can be inhaled by humans in dust contaminated by droppings or urine. The troops had likely kicked the virus up as they dug foxholes.

Old vs. New World

Since then, numerous strains that can be transmitted to humans have been identified. They divide into two groups: Old World hantaviruses, in Europe and Asia, cause kidney dysfunction and have a mortality rate of 1% to 15%; New World ones, in the Americas, lead to severe lung infections and are fatal in around 40% of cases. It was the latter group that caused the outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius, and specifically the Andes strain, the only hantavirus that – in very rare cases – can pass from human to human.

It is not yet clear how this outbreak started, said Esther Addley in The Guardian, but it is thought that one, or possibly two, passengers were carrying the virus, which has an incubation period of up to 42 days, when they boarded the ship in Argentina on 1 April. A Dutch ornithologist who fell ill on 6 April and died five days later has been identified as “patient zero”. He had spent months travelling in South America with his wife – who died on 26 April. A German woman then died on 2 May. By 10 May, seven others had fallen ill.

No pandemic

This week, 20 British nationals on board flew home to the UK, and were bussed to an isolation facility on the Wirral, said Sarah Knapton in The Daily Telegraph. Described as healthy, they were assessed for 72 hours and then asked to self-isolate at home for 42 days.

Health officials have stressed that we are not facing a pandemic. The Andes strain does not spread easily: it requires intimate or very close contact. And though many passengers left the ship weeks ago, there have so far been no “third-generation” cases – among people who were not on board. Given the virus’s incubation period, clinicians say that 21 June is the date to watch: if there have been no third-generation cases by then, it means the outbreak has run its course.

What happened

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday preserved access to mifepristone, a common mail-order abortion drug. The decision, which extends a pause on a lower court’s ruling while a Louisiana lawsuit on the issue plays out, means women can continue to order the pills through telehealth communications without seeing a doctor in person. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

Who said what

This decision is “remarkable” because easy access to abortion pills is a “scheme to undermine” the court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Alito wrote in his dissent. Mifepristone manufacturer Danco Laboratories said the ruling meant a “safe and effective drug Americans depend on will continue to be available.” The court “has thrown abortion providers and patients a lifeline — albeit a temporary one,” said Politico.

What next?

The Court of Appeals is not expected to rule on the Louisiana suit until after the November midterms, and the issue “could ultimately return to the justices on their normal docket,” said The Hill. In the meantime, the Federal Drug Administration is conducting a safety review of mifepristone.

After years of combined effort, an international coalition has come up with a new proposed name for one of the reproductive disorders affecting millions worldwide. Women’s reproductive health has long been a blind spot in the medical industry, but the group hopes that renaming polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) to polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS) will help illuminate a better path forward in treating it.

Why the push to change the name PCOS?

For decades, millions of patients with symptoms like “irregular periods, pelvic pain, excess body hair and acne” have been diagnosed with PCOS, said The New York Times. Getting a diagnosis can be difficult, and those who do encounter stigma and imperfect treatment options along the way. An international consortium of doctors and researchers concluded that the condition’s name was part of the problem. Many PCOS patients “don’t have ovarian cysts at all,” but they often have “widespread hormonal and metabolic dysfunction.”

After more than a decade of “vigorous debate” over the need for a different name that more precisely describes the syndrome, a gathering of 56 organizations debuted the result: polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMOS, said Stat News. It was introduced in a policy paper published in The Lancet and presented at the European Congress of Endocrinology in Prague.

Since the previous name of the illness didn’t accurately describe the condition, it contributed to “delayed diagnosis, fragmented care and stigma, while curtailing research and policy framing,” the consortium members said in the paper. The change was based on input from dozens of organizations and experts, as well as feedback from more than 14,000 patients.

The new name “moves away from the incorrect focus on cysts” to recognizing this as a “much broader condition,” said lead study author Helena Teede, the director of Melbourne’s Monash Center for Health Research and Implementation, to The Guardian. The effects of PMOS on the body are “virtually all endocrine — hormonal.” Patients instigated a name change because they knew “how much they have suffered because of the name, and they were really passionate.” The efforts were “unprecedented,” and nobody has “put this much effort into a name change ever.”

In the policy paper, the authors lay out a plan for the World Health Organization and the International Classification of Diseases to adopt the new name over the next three years, potentially making it the international standard by 2028.

How will the name change affect treatment?

The researchers hope the name change will “transform how patients understand the condition” and “how doctors treat it,” said the Times. When a condition affects one organ, everything from research funding to education to clinical guidelines is “all in that box,” Teede said to the outlet. “And in this condition, it was in the wrong box.”

The change could also have “immediate implications for some patients,” prompting doctors to “recommend more screening for metabolic and cardiovascular problems,” said the Times. Renaming it should “redirect” professionals “into thinking about this as a long-term chronic condition and not just a period problem,” Basma Faris, an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said to the outlet.

Funding for studying the disorder and treatments will no longer be limited to sources focused on ovarian health, Teede said to Time. Despite affecting “170 million reproductive-age women” and creating a “health and economic burden” that is “huge,” the illness hasn’t had much investment in research. Getting it categorized differently means “we get more evidence on how to treat it.”

Women’s health is “notoriously underfunded,” Christina Boots, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said to CNN. Recognizing that it “spans not just reproductive issues, but mental health and metabolic health as well,” may help “enhance the number of dollars and the number of studies that are to understand it and treat it.”

About 5 million to 6 million American women have PMOS, according to the Endocrine Society and the CDC. It affects up to 12% of American women of reproductive age. Despite how common it is, the condition “remains misunderstood and underresearched,” said The Cut, and the World Health Organization estimates that nearly 70% of women who suffer from it have never been diagnosed. Even though the “diagnostic criteria have not changed,” experts hope that a new, more accurate name will “help more people get a diagnosis sooner.”

‘11 hantavirus deaths in Argentina were a warning’

Abraar Karan at The Washington Post

The “recent Andes hantavirus outbreak on the Hondius cruise ship has seized international attention after three passengers died” and the incident is a “warning sign of where the world’s pandemic prevention system still has weaknesses,” says Abraar Karan. While “there is no way to avoid outbreaks, proactive approaches could reduce risk.” More “detailed predeparture screening could help shipboard doctors diagnose sick patients better,” although “this approach is only as foolproof as the people who are reporting their exposures.”

Read more

‘The crisis in Sudan is much worse than what is acknowledged’

Zia Salik at Al Jazeera

In the “streets of Sudan’s capital, the destruction was apocalyptic,” says Zia Salik. The “difficulty in accessing many areas, and the sense that this is a complicated war in a faraway place, means the crisis has not received anywhere near the international attention it needs.” For “many people, the greatest fear now is that the unending war in the west of the country will result in Sudan, one of the largest countries in Africa, splitting in two.”

Read more

‘What leaders get wrong about the ROI of AI’

Katy George at Time

“If you ask most executives about AI right now, the conversation quickly turns to one question: where is the return?” says Katy George. That is “not because AI isn’t delivering value. It’s because many organizations are still looking for value in the wrong places.” AI’s impact “shows up in greater insight, more predictive power, in-task skill building and the ability to evaluate more scenarios before acting.” But “those gains don’t fit neatly into traditional metrics.”

Read more

‘States need to come clean on SNAP fraud’

Gov. Larry Rhoden at Newsweek

One “practical example of a resource that should be managed with care is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP),” says Gov. Larry Rhoden (R-S.D.). Americans “should take great pride that such a program exists, but that should inspire diligence in its oversight.” States with “higher error rates — in the double digits in many cases — warrant attention and accountability to ensure program integrity is upheld nationwide.” The “solution starts with bringing greater transparency to the issue.”

Read more

What happened

Engaging in the arts, whether directly or by going to museums or concerts, helps people age more slowly, British researchers reported Monday in the journal Innovation in Aging. The benefits were found to be comparable to physical exercise and quitting smoking. They were most pronounced for people over 40 and those who engage in a wider range of artistic endeavors.

Who said what

The University College London researchers looked at how often 3,556 adults in the U.K. engaged in some artistic pursuit — singing, painting, dancing, crafting, photography — or visited an exhibition or heritage site. Those who did so weekly aged 4% slower in blood tests of their “epigenetic clock,” or biological aging. “People were around a year younger biologically if they’re regularly engaged in the arts,” researcher Daisy Fancourt, the study’s lead author, told NPR. Monthly arts engagement slowed aging by 3%.

Slower biological aging “does not necessarily mean someone will live longer,” The Guardian said, but “previous studies have suggested a link between arts engagement and longer lifespan.”

What next?

The research “builds on a growing body of evidence” that arts activities “reduce stress, lower inflammation and improve cardiovascular disease risk,” study senior author Feifei Bu told The Guardian. Regular creative engagement should be treated not “as a luxury” but “an essential,” Fancourt told The Art Newspaper, “just like we promote 10,000 steps a day or five-a-day of fruits and vegetables.”

What happened

Food and Drug Administration chief Dr. Marty Makary resigned Tuesday after a tumultuous 13 months leading the agency charged with regulating drugs, medical devices, vaccines and much of the U.S. food supply. The White House and Health and Human Services Department “agreed in recent days on the need to replace” him, The Washington Post said. “Marty is a great guy,” President Donald Trump, who posted Makary’s resignation message on social media, told reporters. But “he was having some difficulty.”

Who said what

“In the end,” Makary “had just about run out of allies,” having upset “rare-disease patients, antiabortion groups and some drug-industry leaders,” The Wall Street Journal said. Makary also “drew criticism from public health leaders who viewed him as pandering to anti-vaccine activists,” The New York Times said. But according to his confidantes, he “ultimately left over concerns about the administration’s decision to authorize fruit-flavored e-cigarettes,” a move Trump insisted on but Makary opposed “over concerns that fruity and candy flavors would lure young people to addictive vapes.”

Makary had some “strong ideas” about streamlining the drug review process, Matthew Herper said at Stat News, but he was the FDA’s “worst commissioner” in at least 25 years. He “offended almost everyone involved in FDA issues, which is not easy to do,” National Center for Health Research president Diana Zuckerman told the Times. “But it would still be a disaster if he is replaced by someone who appeals primarily to tobacco companies, anti-abortion activists” and pharmaceutical lobbyists.

What next?

Trump appointed Kyle Diamantas, the FDA’s top food regulator, as acting commissioner.

‘We’re thinking about mental health diagnoses all wrong’

Awais Aftab at The New York Times

For “decades, the public conversation about mental health has been routed through the categories in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM,” says Awais Aftab. These “have been convenient for professional communication, insurance billing and conducting clinical trials, but they have given the false impression that each mental disorder is a relatively distinct problem with clear boundaries.” They “can capture something useful and inform treatment options, but none of them do justice” to the “nature of mental illness.”

Read more

‘What Jews can learn from the pope’

Kenneth Seeskin at the Chicago Tribune

Pope Leo XIV is a “distinguished proponent of peace, human dignity and concern for disadvantaged people,” says Kenneth Seeskin. While “there is no one in Judaism who speaks with the authority of a pope, as people of God, Jews also face the question of how to make sense of an ancient and not always consistent tradition.” The “Jewish community is deeply divided over Israel’s actions in Gaza,” and “Jews must ask the same questions of their religion.”

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‘Here comes the slop’

Heather Schwedel at Slate

Many “photos of wedding dresses” have “either been designed or enhanced by AI,” says Heather Schwedel. If “you’re shopping for a wedding dress in 2026, you’re almost guaranteed to encounter at least a little slop.” As AI’s “popularity with everyday consumers has grown over the past few years, it’s taken hold in seemingly every medium,” and “even knitters are having to learn to separate real patterns from the AI-generated ones. Of course wedding dresses aren’t immune.”

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‘Rethinking transitional justice in Bosnia’

Jared O. Bell at Foreign Policy

The U.S. and EU “have treated constitutional reform and war crimes accountability as the primary metrics of progress in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” says Jared O. Bell. If Bosnia “has not unified its narratives of the past or produced visibly contrite leaders, Western logic goes, then it has ‘failed.’” But Bosnia’s “most consequential peace process” is “unfolding in factories, logistics hubs, municipal utilities and cross-entity supply chains — in the daily economic life that keeps the country running.”

Read more

What happened

The Dutch cruise ship at the center of the hantavirus outbreak docked off Spain’s Canary Islands on Sunday so passengers could be evacuated to their home countries. They included all 17 American passengers from the MV Hondius, one of whom tested positive for the virus Sunday while another developed mild symptoms, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department said. One of five French passengers also tested positive after showing symptoms on the flight home, the French government said. Three passengers have died since April 11 and at least five others have fallen ill with hantavirus symptoms.

Who said what

Hantavirus is a rare and deadly virus usually spread by inhaling rodent droppings, but the Andes strain found in the infected passengers can spread through close human contact, the World Health Organization said. “This is not another Covid,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “And the risk to the public is low.”

What next?

The U.S. passengers are arriving in Omaha on Monday morning, where most will be monitored at the specialized National Quarantine Unit while the one who tested positive will be transferred to the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, HHS said.

The Trump administration has lofty expectations about the state of the pharmaceutical industry, but not everyone appears to be a believer. Recent data from the White House predicted that the administration’s deals with drug companies could save the economy more than half a trillion dollars over the next decade. While Republicans are lauding this estimate, many Democrats are taking it with a grain of salt.

‘Touted his drug pricing deals as transformative’

The White House predicts that Trump’s deals could save $529 billion over the next 10 years, according to an analysis of data obtained by The Associated Press. The administration also estimated that federal and state governments could “save a combined $64.3 billion on Medicaid during the next decade” because of Trump’s agreements, Josh Doak said at the AP.

Trump administration officials have touted the president’s “drug pricing deals as transformative and urged Congress to codify their principles into law” as part of “most favored nation” (MFN) pricing, said Doak. The White House has “reached voluntary agreements with 17 pharmaceutical companies,” and it appears the administration’s “goal is to bring manufacturers of sole-source brand-name drugs and biologics into comparable arrangements,” Colleen Cabili said at Quartz. Details on the deal specifics remain unclear.

The president has “sought to position his pharmaceutical pricing push as a winning issue with voters,” said Cabili. Given his plummeting poll numbers over affordability, Trump has been “focusing on his efforts to cut deals with companies so that the cost of prescription drugs in the U.S. would no longer be dramatically higher than in other affluent nations,” said Doak.

The mechanism ‘remains a black box’

Despite the White House’s optimism, many across the aisle are skeptical of the Trump administration’s potential cost savings. Just prior to the White House’s analysis, 17 Democratic senators introduced legislation that would force Trump to provide details of the drug deals. If “these deals are actually lowering costs for patients, show us,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), one of the co-sponsors of the legislation, said in a statement. “Americans deserve transparency.”

If “these deals are so great, why is the Trump administration afraid of showing them to the public? Because Trump is a giant fraud when it comes to lower drug prices,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a parallel statement. The “scope of the savings claimed by the Trump administration are likely to intensify the scrutiny by Democrats,” said Doak at the AP. One of their primary concerns is that “pharmaceutical companies have increased their profit margins while working with the administration.”

The “exact mechanism” for these savings “remains a black box,” said Angus Liu at the biopharma news website Fierce Pharma. Beyond the price of the drugs themselves, the White House “has yet to define how commercial markets, such as employer-sponsored insurance, will access those discounted rates.” The “math for these massive savings only adds up if the administration can expand its circle of agreements beyond the 17 Big Pharma firms initially targeted” by Trump. Many biotech companies are also wary of “MFN’s impact on their business models” and “argue that they lack the diverse portfolios of pharma companies that can absorb revenue hits from pricing pressure.”

What if a cling wrap could fight disease? A newly developed plastic film has successfully killed viruses on contact. The material could be easily mass-produced and doesn’t have to be reapplied. In the future, it may even replace traditional chemical cleaners.

Predatory plastic

Scientists have created a thin, acrylic film that can kill viruses, according to a study published in the journal Advanced Science. The film contains nanopillars, which are “ultra‑fine structures” that “grab and stretch the outer shell of the virus so much that it ruptures, killing the virus through mechanical force rather than chemical disinfectants,” said a press release about the study. The material was tested on human parainfluenza virus 3 (hPIV-3), which causes bronchiolitis and pneumonia, and it “successfully killed (or damaged irreparably) 94% of the viruses with which it came into contact after just one hour,” said Popular Mechanics.

There have been other surface viral disinfectants developed, but these “often involve incorporating materials such as graphene or tannic acid and other natural agents into personal protective equipment such as masks, gloves, goggles, hard hats and respirators,” Elena Ivanova, a professor of physics at RMIT University and senior author of the study, said at The Conversation. While efficient, these disinfectants “can pose a risk to human health” and may also be “environmental hazards due to chemical leaching.” Plus they have “declining effectiveness over time as the potency of the active ingredients weakens.”

Other disinfectants, like wipes and sprays, require more effort. Disinfectant “must remain wet for some time to kill germs,” said Ivanova. The surfaces can also be “recontaminated quickly when other people touch them.” Acrylic films, by contrast, are “continually effective (meaning they don’t have to be reapplied over and over again), they don’t harm the environment and they don’t contribute to antimicrobial resistance,” said Popular Mechanics. The film is also much more scalable and could potentially be produced in a similar manner to cling wrap.

Film of the future

While the plastic film shows promise, we are not quite at the place to replace current disinfectants with it. The product was tested only on hPIV‑3, which is an “enveloped virus with a fatty outer membrane,” said the release. This membrane makes it more conducive to getting caught and being ripped apart by the nanopillars. Researchers are now planning to “test smaller and nonenveloped viruses to see how broadly the nanotextured surface works.”

The effectiveness of the nanotexture also depends on the distance between each pillar. The closer the features are together, the more virus-fighting ability the film has. There need to be “more tests on curved surfaces, which — by their geometric nature — spread the pillars apart,” said Popular Mechanics. The material can also degrade over time.

“As nanofabrication tools get better, our results give a clearer guide to which nanopatterns work best to kill viruses,” Samson Mah, the lead author of the study, said in a press release. “We could one day have surfaces like phone screens, keyboards and hospital tables covered with this film, killing viruses on contact without using harsh chemicals.”

The thymus is a small organ behind the breastbone that helps to establish the body’s immune system early in life. Since it shrinks with age, it was once thought to become mostly inactive over time. And many people have had their thymus removed, primarily as a treatment for myasthenia gravis. But this mini organ may be mightier than expected.

The organ has been “overlooked for decades and may be a missing piece in explaining why people age differently and why cancer treatments fail in some patients,” said Hugo Aerts, a corresponding author on both studies, in a press release. And now two different studies published in the journal Nature — one connecting the long-term health of adults with their thymic health and the other analyzing cancer therapy outcomes and thymic health — point to the thymus playing an important role in wellness.

T-cells and immunity

The thymus’ main function is to “generate a diverse T-cell repertoire, which provides adaptive immunity throughout life,” said the Nature study on thymic long-term health consequences. While the “relevance and abundance of the T-cell repertoire at a young age are well documented,” it’s likely that the thymus “retains a continued role in T-cell production throughout adulthood and that the pattern of decline of thymic function in adults is associated with poorer health outcomes.”

Higher thymic health scores are “associated with laboratory markers of continued T-cell production, greater T-cell diversity in blood and tumors, and stronger activity of immune pathways, supporting thymic health as a proxy for immune competence,” said the press release. “When thymic health and T-cell diversity decline, the immune system becomes less able to respond to new threats, like cancer or other diseases.”

Surprising health indicator

People with better thymic health had “about a 50% lower risk of premature death, 63% lower risk of cardiovascular death, and 36% lower risk of developing lung cancer compared to those with low thymic health,” said the release. Researchers saw “similar patterns across many other causes of death, suggesting that thymic health may reflect overall immune resilience.”

A healthy thymus is also “associated with reduced risks of progression and all-cause mortality” in cancer patients, said the Nature study on thymic health and cancer. The outcomes were especially positive for those with lung cancer. People with “healthier thymuses were more likely to respond to cancer immunotherapy drugs, which trigger the immune system to fight cancer, but don’t work for many patients,” said The Washington Post. Because of the T-cells’ role in immunity, those with their thymus removed can also have an “increased risk of autoimmune disease,” said a 2023 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Future solutions

The general health of the thymus can be influenced by “lifestyle and metabolic health measures, such as smoking, physical activity or HDL levels,” said the long-term health consequences study. Thymic decay is “highly individualized even in presumed healthy adults, indicating that thymic function can also be substantially reduced in individuals who did not have their thymus surgically removed.” While the thymus cannot be directly attributed to better health outcomes, there are now “new leads to be explored,” said the Post.

In the future, it might be possible to “engineer a thymus from an organ donor to help people who receive transplants tolerate their new organ without taking harsh anti-rejection drugs,” said the Post. There’s also interest in “probing whether there are ways to slow down the thymus’ natural deterioration,” which could have “many applications in autoimmune diseases, improving people’s responses to vaccinations as they age or improving how people respond to cancer immunotherapies.”

Hantavirus is typically spread by exposure to rodent droppings. That’s concerning enough. But health experts are alarmed that a deadly ship-borne outbreak of hantavirus might be spreading from human to human.

The possibility of person-to-person transmission of hantavirus is “very, very surprising and obviously a very rare occurrence,” Kari Debbink of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said to NPR. Three people aboard the MV Hondius cruise ship have already died from the outbreak, and there are several other suspected cases among the 147 passengers and crew.

A typical rodent-caused outbreak could be resolved by “taking people off the ship,” the University of Michigan’s Emily Abdoler said to the network. But the possibility of a human-transmitted disease means “taking folks off the ship doesn’t stop the spread.”

Passengers aboard the Hondius have been isolated in their cabins in a “lockdown reminiscent of the Covid-19 pandemic,” said The Associated Press. Authorities are being cautious but also warning the public against panic. The Andes strain of hantavirus at issue “requires very close, prolonged contact” to spread between people, KFF Health News’ Céline Gounder said on “PBS NewsHour.” That’s “very different” from Covid or flu viruses that can be “transmitted much more easily through the airborne respiratory route.”

What did the commentators say?

The outbreak is “serious and frankly a bit unnerving,” Katherine J. Wu said at The Atlantic. A human-transmitted hantavirus could “pose an additional threat” to people at the ship’s destination or to healthcare workers treating the sick. The ship’s passengers will eventually disembark, but officials cannot yet say the risk that passengers and crew “will pose to the broader global community.” Making the investigation more difficult: The cruise ship environment where “strangers are constantly schmoozing” makes it easy for people-to-people viruses to spread but difficult for medical professionals to track the source.

There’s “no reason for panic,” Lisa Jarvis said at Bloomberg. A “handful of cases of a deadly virus” is understandably sufficient to “raise all our hackles” following the Covid pandemic. Hantavirus is “ubiquitous” in parts of the United States such as the desert Southwest, while actual “infections are still rare.” The current outbreak is “unlikely to turn into anything bigger.”

The World Health Organization was “built to manage” emergencies like this, Krutika Kuppalli said at Stat News. Indeed, the WHO is “coordinating the response.” But the U.S. government has not been able to take advantage of the information generated by the agency, having withdrawn from the WHO in 2025. And the outbreak should be a “warning sign to the U.S.” of the costs of that decision.

What next?

The Hondius “remains at sea” while regional leaders “clash over its docking,” said The New York Times. Spain has said the ship can dock in the Canary Islands, but regional government officials have “objected to the ship docking there.” The isolated passengers are keeping themselves busy with “reading, watching movies, having hot drinks and that kind of thing,” said travel influencer Kasem Hato to the Times.

Life on board the MV Hondius has turned from a dream adventure to a tragic nightmare after the outbreak of hantavirus.

Three people were today evacuated from the boat that is currently off the coast of Cape Verde. The patients – British, German, and Dutch nationals – are being taken to the Netherlands to receive medical care. In addition to the three passengers who died earlier in the cruise, five other people are thought to have symptoms consistent with an outbreak of hantavirus.

Though the “overall public health risk remains low”, the World Health Organization is closely monitoring the health of passengers and crew on board the ship, said WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Earlier, the Canary Islands government announced its opposition to Spain’s plan to allow the Hondius to dock there. Its originally intended destination, Cape Verde, had also refused the ship entry.

‘Tragic echoes’ of Covid

When the MV Hondius set sail in April, it was embarking on a “voyage of adventure to some of the world’s most remote islands”, said CNN. “Whales, dolphins and penguins awaited; landscapes of icy expanses, towering cliffs and rolling green hills beckoned.”

Now, the “nearly 150 passengers” are “isolating in their cabins, trapped aboard a ship anchored in the Atlantic, taking what measures they can to shield themselves from an outbreak of a deadly virus”.

Travel vlogger Kasem Hato, who is on board, said: “Most of the people on the ship are taking the matter very calmly.” The ship’s captain and staff are keeping passengers updated at regular intervals, while the passengers themselves are keeping “busy by reading, watching movies, drinking hot beverages”. He added: “If it were going to become an epidemic, it would have happened a long time ago.”

Crew and passengers are not only “trapped” on a ship experiencing a “lethal hantavirus outbreak”, but they are also “totally isolated from the rest of the world”, said The Times. Thought to cost around £10,000 per person, the cruise has “descended into something with tragic echoes of the early days of the Covid-19 epidemic”.

Whether the ship can dock in the Canary Islands has become a “hot political issue”, said the BBC. Fernando Clavijo, the islands’ president, has called his lack of involvement in the initial decision to permit docking there an act of “institutional disloyalty” by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. The head of the Island Council of Tenerife has announced her “outright and utter rejection” of the plan to allow the ship to dock in the territory.

A ‘miserable wait’

There are two possible ways passengers could have contracted hantavirus, said Thomas Jeffries of Western Sydney University on The Conversation. One is exposure while on a shore excursion, and the other is the possibility of rodents entering the ship in its cargo. “Hygiene standards and food storage practices may have caused the infection to spread more quickly.”

For investigators, the exact cause of the outbreak is a “mystery”, said The Telegraph. The Hondius “did not travel anywhere where the virus is endemic”, and Antarctic cruise ships have to adhere to “scrupulous infection control” to protect the environment. Passengers are “usually hosed down with disinfectant” before and after disembarking to avoid contaminating the area with any pathogens.

In the coming days, it may be possible to track down the source through the infected crew members, as they rarely accompany passengers on trips. “Narrowing down who went to particular locations should help pinpoint the source of the outbreak.” Unless a mouse or rat has “stowed away” on board, it is more likely that “several passengers on the ship were exposed at the same time, probably during an excursion”.

Thankfully, this is “not a new pandemic waiting to begin”, said The Telegraph. “The risk for the rest of the world is negligible.”

Having said that, isolating passengers are likely to “face a miserable wait”. Due to the incubation period of the virus, the ship may need to quarantine for up to eight weeks, and it’s likely the number of infections will rise. However, it is “unlikely to spread between passengers, so only those initially exposed will be at risk”.

What happened

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is in critical condition in a Florida hospital as he recovers from pneumonia, but he “is now breathing on his own” after requiring a ventilator, spokesperson Ted Goodman said in a statement Monday. Giuliani, 81, is the “ultimate fighter” and “he is winning this battle.”

Who said what

Giuliani, once hailed as “America’s Mayor” for his response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City, has “struggled with legal and financial problems in recent years,” The New York Times said. Last year, he “suffered a fractured vertebra” from a car crash in New Hampshire, and he “made at least one public appearance in a wheelchair.” On his podcast last week, Giuliani said his voice was “a little under the weather.” Goodman said Giuliani had been diagnosed with restrictive airway disease stemming from his proximity to Ground Zero on 9/11, and “this condition adds complications to any respiratory illness.”

What next?

Giuliani’s health had “concerned those around him” recently, People said, citing a source close to the Trump administration. He “isn’t in good shape,” the source said.

The case of a woman denied sterilisation by the NHS has brought the procedure, and the alleged double standards that hamper access to it, back into the spotlight.

Leah Spasova, a psychologist from Oxford, spent 10 years trying to access the procedure, but her funding request was turned down over “concerns regarding potential regret and cost-effectiveness”, said the BBC. As the same NHS body regularly funds vasectomies without using potential regret as grounds for rejection, Spasova complained to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman.

Last Friday, the ombudsman ruled that a policy citing the “risk of regret” as grounds to refuse funding was “unfair” to women.

What did the ombudsman say?

The Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire West Integrated Care Board’s approach was “unfair, inconsistent, and based on subjective reasoning”, the ombudsman ruled. And Spasova’s case “is not an isolated one”.

A committee responsible for recommendations across six integrated care boards in the southeast reviewed the female sterilisation policy after Spasova’s complaint. It recommended that regret or the availability of other contraception should no longer be used as grounds for refusal, and that all patients who meet the critiera can access female sterilisation.

“Rejecting my application for sterilisation on the basis of regret means they were taking on liability for my feelings,” said Spasova. Policies like this are “damaging for women’s healthcare” and “absolutely discriminatory”.

How does female sterilisation work?

Sterilisation is a procedure that blocks, seals or cuts the fallopian tubes, to prevent eggs from reaching the uterus. Also known as tubal ligation (“getting your tubes tied”), it’s usually performed under general anaesthetic via keyhole surgery, with about a week of recovery. Although complex procedures do exist to reverse it, they typically have a success rate of between 50-70% and aren’t usually available on the NHS.

Female sterilisation is the most common contraceptive method used worldwide, according to the UN. In 2019, nearly 24% of women using contraception relied on sterilisation – but it’s far more prevalent in Asia and Latin America than Europe.

A 2022 analysis of Dutch women puts the rate of regret at about 10.5%, compared with 5.1% of men who regret vasectomies. But the rate of regret is nearly twice as high among women under the age of 30: about 20%. NHS clinical guidance says sterilisation should be available for women, with counselling to address the risk of regret.

Is it available on the NHS?

Sterilisation for both men and women is organised by local integrated care boards (ICBs), as part of NHS contraception services. Most ICBs routinely fund both male and female procedures, subject to certain criteria being met, but some told The i Paper that “vasectomy is encouraged or preferred over female sterilisation”. Others “go one step further and restrict funding for female sterilisation”, said the paper. In those areas, women have to submit an individual funding request for approval.

In 2024-2025, the NHS carried out nearly 11,000 sterilisations: a year-on-year increase of 2%. But the long-term trend is downward: a 22% decrease in a decade. In contrast, the number of vasectomies performed in 2024-25 was 16% higher than in 2023-24.

What are the barriers to access?

Critics argue that the stricter eligibility criteria for women seeking sterilisation “amount to unequal treatment compared with men seeking vasectomies”, said The Guardian. But others say “tighter controls reflect legitimate medical concerns”, including the risks associated with a more invasive procedure.

Patients seeking sterilisation have been “told they are too young”, said Charlotte Glynn of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service. “There is a real problem with women not being trusted to make decisions about their own bodies,” she said. It is “a form of medical misogyny”, especially when many women "struggle with the side-effects of contraceptive pills”.

Many women are told they “might change their mind” or are asked what their partners think about their decision, Annabel Sowemimo, a consultant in sexual and reproductive health, told The i Paper. Tubal ligation also costs more than vasectomies as it requires “multiple members of staff and time in theatre”. This is compounded by the “obscene” waiting times for gynaecology treatment, she said. Life-threatening conditions are prioritised, while patients waiting for sterilisation are advised to use contraceptives instead.

Poor architecture can be a public health crisis. And in Tanzania, moving families into specially designed Star Homes has resulted in a marked reduction in the spread of deadly diseases among the children living in them.

Old vs. new housing

Most houses in Tanzanian villages use “mud and thatch” and are “single-story, placing the sleeping spaces at-grade,” said The Architect’s Newspaper. These living arrangements likely contribute to the spread of malaria, diarrhea and acute respiratory infections (ARIs), which are the “major causes of mortality in young children in sub-Saharan Africa,” said a study published in the journal Nature Medicine.

Designed by researchers, Star Homes are “novel double-story” houses that “provide an insect-proof, cleaner, cooler and smoke-free environment, with a reliable supply of water and sanitation,” said the study. They have “screened facades to allow airflow while keeping out insects, bedrooms on the top floor because mosquitoes mostly stay close to the ground, and an outdoor latrine and a system to harvest and store rainwater to help reduce the spread of diarrheal diseases,” said Science. They also have a “rodent-proof storage room, self-closing doors and a solar-powered electric light.”

To test the new housing, scientists randomly placed households with children under age 13  in either “110 Star Homes or in 513 traditional mud and thatched-roofed houses,” said the study. After 36 months, children living in Star Homes had a “significantly reduced risk of malaria (44% reduction), diarrhea (27%) and ARIs (18%) compared to children living in traditional mud and thatched-roof homes.”

The improved housing also led to a “reduction in stunting,” where children under age 5  were “taller for their age than those living in traditional homes,” said the study. Healthier children are the “ultimate measure of success,” said Salum Mshamu, the lead field investigator of the Tanzanian research consulting firm CSK Research Solutions, to The Architect’s Newspaper. “Reducing stunting has lifelong consequences for education, earnings and well-being.”

More for less

The findings show that “architecture can function as a health intervention on a par with medicine when it’s developed and documented using scientific methods,” said Jakob Knudsen, the lead architect of the Star Homes, to The Architect’s Newspaper. Traditional homes in Tanzania and other sub-Saharan countries tend to “absorb heat during the day and discharge it into the houses at night,” said The Architectural Review. “High interior temperatures lead to low use of bed nets (temperature rises further inside the net), increasing the risk of mosquito bites.”

The Star Home solves many of these problems and “costs 24% less in materials than a conventional single-story cement-block house, requires 73% less concrete and generates 57% less embodied carbon,” said a release about the study. “We now hope that the building industry will adopt some of the important features of our healthy house design,” said Steve Lindsay, a professor of biosciences at the U.K.’s Durham University and the author of the study, in the release. Better building practices can “turn a dangerous home into a safe one.”

What happened

President Donald Trump on Thursday tapped radiologist Dr. Nicole Saphier to be U.S. surgeon general, withdrawing the stalled nomination of nutrition influencer Dr. Casey Means, an ally of Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again movement. Saphier is Trump’s third nominee, after Means and Dr. Janette Nesheiwat.

Who said what

The “MAHA movement had pushed hard for Means’ nomination,” The Washington Post said, and it blamed its failure on Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and two other Republican senators skeptical of her qualifications and stance on vaccines. Trump called Saphier, a former Fox News contributor, an “INCREDIBLE COMMUNICATOR” on “complicated health issues” in a social media post. Kennedy called her a “longtime warrior for the MAHA movement.” But unlike Means, Saphier “does not appear to be a heroine” of MAHA, The New York Times said. Its “leaders view her as too conventional” due to her tempered praise of vaccines and criticism of Kennedy, though she has “also embraced” some of his agenda.

What next?

Even as MAHA lost its “favored influencer for surgeon general,” it “notched a big win on pesticide regulation” in a House farm bill, Axios said. Thursday’s events highlighted how MAHA retains “clout on matters related to the food supply” but “can be a political liability” on “vaccines and other public health matters.”

Along with wind, rain and lightning, the weather may bring about unexpected health problems. Acute attacks of “thunderstorm asthma” can worsen pollen allergies and exacerbate respiratory conditions. And as climate change is likely to cause more storms in the future, more people will be put at risk.

Storm surge

Generally, “rain tends to lower pollen counts by cleansing the air, and many people find that rainy weather tends to reduce asthma symptoms triggered by allergies,” said Harvard Health Publishing. But thunderstorms are an exception because they can cause cold downdrafts, which “concentrate air particles, such as pollen and mold.” The particles are then “swept up into clouds where humidity is high,” and “wind, humidity and lightning break up the particles to a size that can readily enter the nose, sinuses and lungs.” Strong gusts of wind disperse the pollen and mold, irritating lungs.

The rapid breakdown and spread of air particles can cause thunderstorm asthma. “Right after a thunderstorm, people can have more asthma,” Clifford Bassett, the founder and medical director at Allergy and Asthma Care of New York, said to The Weather Channel. The phenomenon is caused by a “complex interaction between environmental and meteorological factors, coupled with intense aeroallergen exposure in susceptible individuals,” Constance H. Katelaris, a senior staff specialist of immunology and allergy at Campbelltown Hospital and Western Sydney University, said at InSight+.

Those most likely to experience thunderstorm asthma are people with pollen allergies and hay fever (rhinitis), as well as those with preexisting asthma and poor asthma control. Adults in their third or fourth decade of life appear to be especially susceptible. Older children are also vulnerable, being in the “peak ages for expression of allergic rhinitis,” said Katelaris. There may also be a “significantly increased risk among individuals of Asian and Indian descent,” according to data from the “largest and deadliest episode of thunderstorm asthma recorded to date,” in Melbourne in 2016. “Six of the 10 people who died were of Asian or Indian descent.”

A big storm’s a-coming

While thunderstorm asthma “may seem like more of a curiosity than a serious threat to public health,” when it “affects a large population area, emergency rooms can become overwhelmed,” said Harvard Health Publishing. During the Melbourne episode, over 3,400 people experienced severe asthma symptoms and 10 people died. “Any pollen, any dust, anything that is sitting on the ground will be dispersed, and it will be blown onto cars, into the circulating air, perhaps into homes, if the windows are open, and onto anyone who is outside and unfortunate to be in the path,” meteorologist Dante Ricci said to National Geographic.

Cases of thunderstorm asthma are expected to increase in the future due to climate change. Globally warming temperatures can lead to “prolonged allergenic pollen seasons combined with increased pollen allergenicity, as well as heightened likelihood of extreme weather events,” said a review published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice. In the U.S., “more than 28 million people have asthma and about 81 million people have seasonal allergies,” said Harvard Health Publishing. The best way to prevent thunderstorm asthma is to have rescue inhalers and medicine handy and to avoid going outside for 24 hours after a storm if you experience pollen allergies or preexisting asthma.

“Having an older sibling can be a mixed blessing,” said The Times. You have a “ready-made playmate”, but younger siblings must endure hand-me-downs, while sharing toys and the attention of their parents.

But a new study shows that birth order could also affect the likelihood of developing certain conditions. Research led by the University of Chicago has analysed data from more than 10 million siblings in the largest ever study of its kind. It found associations between the order of birth and susceptibility to autism, anxiety, hay fever and migraines, among other health conditions.

Though the findings should not be read deterministically, and have not yet been peer-reviewed, more than a third of medical conditions (150 out of 418) showed “birth order associations”, according to the study. “Of these, 79 were more common in firstborns, while 71 were more common in those born second,” said New Scientist.

What it shows

Previous studies have been criticised for “cherry-picking data or failing to control for confounding factors”. And more research has been done on the links between birth order and IQ. For example, a “landmark” study in 2015 analysed data on 20,000 children and found that birth order had “almost no bearing on personality and only a small association with IQ”. It recorded a “drop of about 1 to 2.5 IQ points between oldest and youngest siblings”.

The latest study, however, focused on the “likelihood of developing different conditions”, said New Scientist. In order to “mitigate some confounding factors”, such as the “influence of how parents might treat their first and second children differently”, researchers first compared 1.6 million pairs of siblings by “coupling firstborns from one family with those born second from another family”. They were matched on sex, birth year, parental age and sibling age gap.

The study analysed more than 10 million individuals from more than five million families, and found that elder siblings were more likely to be diagnosed with “neurodevelopmental conditions”, such as autism, ADHD and allergies, as well as acne and childhood psychoses, said Scientific American. Second-born siblings, on the other hand, were more likely to be diagnosed with “substance use disorders, shingles and gastrointestinal disorders”.

How far siblings are born apart also “appears to matter”. If the age gap was less than four years, siblings were associated with a lower rate of asthma and other allergies. This aligns with the “hygiene hypothesis”, which suggests that “lower exposure to allergens in early life” can lead to them overreacting to allergens later.

Strengths and limitations

“Overall, this seems like a really rigorous study,” Rohrer told New Scientist, though the associations are modest. Additionally, “we will only observe every person in one birth-order position” and “never know how their life would have played out differently in another position”.

The study’s “strength” is in its “large sample size and design”, which allowed cross-comparison between different families to “control for socioeconomic status and genetics”, said Scientific American.

However, a limitation was that researchers used “administrative insurance claims data” instead of “reviewing the prevalence of health conditions”. Parents could be more likely to seek diagnoses for their firstborn than any subsequent children. “You can’t get a diagnosis if you don’t seek it,” said Rodica Damian of the University of Houston, who was not involved in the study.

Though the variations between siblings identified in the study are small, “they can have an effect” at the “population level”. As Rohrer said: “It could be that all of these small effects of birth order come together to make a difference.”

There has been an increase in the spread of alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), a tick-borne disease that can cause a serious allergy to red meat. More than 110,000 suspected cases of AGS were identified between 2010 and 2022, and while the actual number of U.S. cases is not known, as many as 450,000 people may be affected, according to the CDC. With a particularly strong tick season on the horizon and climate change continuing to worsen, the illness is likely to become more common.

What are the symptoms of AGS?

Alpha-gal is a molecule that is “naturally produced in the bodies of most mammals but not in people” and also “found in the saliva (spit) of some ticks,” said the CDC. When someone gets bitten by a tick, the alpha-gal molecule can be transferred to their blood. Then the “body’s natural defenses, or immune system, can identify alpha-gal as a threat and trigger an allergic reaction.” The reaction occurs “after people eat red meat or are exposed to other products made from mammals.”

Unlike most other allergies, which tend to produce reactions almost immediately, “those with alpha-gal may not experience a reaction to a hamburger for four or six hours” because of “how alpha-gal binds to fats, taking longer to absorb,” said The New York Times. Symptoms may manifest in different ways depending on the person, including “hives, angioedema, gastrointestinal distress and life-threatening anaphylaxis,” said an article published in the Journal of Medical Entomology. There is currently no cure for AGS, and the most common treatment is avoiding “not only red meat and dairy but also vaccines, antivenoms and medications made with components derived from mammals,” said Entomology Today.

AGS can be diagnosed through a blood test, but experts advise getting tested only when someone experiences a reaction and not just after being bitten by a tick. “It’s perfectly clear that 50% of people who have a positive test have no reactions whatsoever,” Thomas Platts-Mills, an allergist at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, said to the Times. The factors that determine whether someone has a reaction are still unknown. Along with some people being asymptomatic, “there are so many false positives,” Scott Commins, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, said to the Times. “So testing after any tick bite would lead to a lot of people avoiding red meat unnecessarily.”

How common is it?

It will likely be a bad year for ticks, “with an unusually high number of bites already reported across the country,” said The Associated Press. “If you have a lot of exposures, there will probably be more cases of tick-related infections,” Alina Filozov, an infectious disease doctor at Middlesex Hospital in Middletown, Connecticut, told the outlet. In the U.S., AGS is “primarily associated with the bite of a lone star tick” and less commonly with the bite of a “blacklegged tick or a western blacklegged tick,” said the CDC. There have been at least 12 tick species linked to alpha-gal syndrome globally, and the disease has been found on six continents.

The best way to prevent AGS is to avoid being bitten by ticks in the first place. Steer clear of heavily wooded or grassy areas, wear light colors and use an approved insect repellent. If you do find a tick on yourself or your pet, remove it immediately.

Climate change is expanding the range of these insects. “Ticks like warm, humid weather, and more can be seen after a mild winter,” said the AP. “More deer and mice available for them to feed on may also factor.” Along with AGS, ticks can spread other diseases, including Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.