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RFK Jr. is wrecking public health — but we can (and will) survive this

News Feed
Sunday, April 13, 2025

The greatest invention of the Industrial Age isn’t the iPhone or lithium-ion batteries or even the internal combustion engine — it’s public health. Unfortunately for our “see it to believe it” culture, public health works best when it’s practically invisible, just humming along in the background. Thus, there are few things Westerners take for granted more than reduced child mortality, reduced death in child birth and the eradication of history’s most brutal diseases like polio and smallpox. Thankfully, very few of us know what it’s like to grow up with half our siblings dying from relatively minor infections or experiencing life-long disability from surviving an epidemic. Those days are behind us — or so some of us thought. For anyone paying the slightest attention, it’s clear our global society is quickly devolving, reverting back to a time before antibiotics and widespread sanitation. It sounds extreme, but little else would explain the fixation on raw milk, for example. A combination of engrained ignorance and political interests is eroding the foundation of something that made our capitalist society possible in the first place. It’s hard to build an international trade empire if your customers are too sick to work or die often.  Because we are so many generations removed from the people who coughed up bloody bits of the Black Death, it’s understandable human nature why so many of us refuse to acknowledge COVID-19 is a serious illness or think ditching vaccination is wise. Naïvety is intoxicating and no one likes confronting their own ableism or mortality. It’s these forces that are allowing us to grind basic tenets like germ theory and fluoridation into the woodchipper. It’s an astonishing level of reckless stupidity that we will be contending with for generations. But let’s not get too sentimental about public health either. It’s far from a perfect system. We can think of it like a great oak, with many branches and deep roots. There’s no denying this tree has been poisoned by profit-seeking incentives that have produced giant, twisted branches like Big Pharma or health care insurance middlemen that profit from denying claims. In spite of this, it has helped people live longer, healthier lives compared to those over a century ago — and to fix the issues that plague it, we need to fertilize it, not chainsaw it down. But that’s exactly what we’re doing. “Public health — and trust in public health — is being eroded in the U.S.,” Dr. Andrea Love, an immunologist and microbiologist, told Salon by email. “We are seeing rejection (and in some instances, legal action) against long-supported and evidence-based public health measures: vaccinations, pasteurization and food safety, water fluoridation. We are also seeing an erasure of investment and funding in research and health care infrastructure that focus on understanding and improving public health. It has been difficult as a scientist, science communicator, and member of this country to see this occurring when we have the most scientific knowledge we have ever had in human history.” This is the kind of leadership at HHS these days: wasting resources attacking established science while dismantling the systems that protect against epidemics and research treatments. It’s bad enough that the public is being gaslit about an ongoing measles outbreak that has so far spread across 25 states, infecting more than 700 people, with more than 540 in Texas alone. This epidemic, caused by a virus that was once eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, has claimed at least two lives: two children, one eight-years old and the other only six. The death of a New Mexico man who had measles is still under investigation.  Despite a recent New York Times headline that suggests this is the "new normal," the resurgence of preventable disease is not a law of nature — it's literally a choice we, as a society, are making. And so much more illness is on the rise, from Victorian-era diseases like tuberculosis to novel tropical diseases like “sloth fever.” The threat of another pandemic, be it bird flu or another COVID-19 surge are always present. But now Republican leadership wants us to pretend like none of this is happening while firing the people who track these sorts of things and gutting social safety nets like Social Security and Medicaid. Last month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced “a major restructuring” of the Health and Human Services Department, which has so far resulted in the mass layoff of about 10,000 federal health workers. At least eight top-level managers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have resigned in recent weeks, all while the agency has clawed back $11.4 billion in COVID-19 research dollars and suppressed a report on measles suggesting that individuals get vaccinated. Most recently, the Trump administration forced out Peter Marks, the nation’s top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration, who wrote in his resignation letter “It is unconscionable with measles outbreaks to not have a full-throated endorsement of measles vaccinations.” Though Kennedy has recently said that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine is the best way to prevent infection and spread, this is in sharp contrast to his previous statements denying vaccine efficacy, including last week when he incorrectly stated that some vaccines “never worked.” Maybe Kennedy wants to give lip service to the MMR shot after attending the funeral of an unvaccinated victim of the Texas measles outbreak, but actions speak louder than words: earlier this month, dozens of free measles vaccine clinics were shuttered in Texas due to federal funding cuts. And Kennedy still won’t let go of this ridiculous notion — debunked again and again — that vaccines are a cause of autism. That hasn’t stopped Health and Human Services from recently appointing a discredited vaccine skeptic to investigate this link. On April 10, Kennedy said we’d “know by September” what has “caused the autism epidemic.” In a statement, Christopher Banks, CEO and president of the Autism Society of America, responded that Kennedy’s remarks are “both unrealistic and misleading,” adding that such efforts “risk undermining decades of progress and causing real harm to the autism community.” Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes. But this is the kind of leadership at HHS these days: wasting resources attacking established science while dismantling the systems that protect against epidemics and research treatments, not to mention denying people access to health care. The institutions monitoring, treating, researching and informing us about disease are now either broken, underfunded or pushing misinformation. It begs the question: is public health even a thing in this country anymore? “As it currently stands, public health no longer exists at the federal level,” Dr. Ryan Marino, an emergency medicine physician at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, told Salon by email. “It’s still to be seen if this very intentional gutting of our public health institutions, infrastructure and funding will decimate state and regional public health but these ‘cuts’ in spending are likely to mean less services everywhere and for everyone.” To illustrate how far back this trend goes, professor Sean Valles, director of the Center for Bioethics at Michigan State University, pointed to a 2013 report by the U.S. National Research Council and the U.S. Institute of Medicine, which summarizes the situation in its title: “Shorter Lives, Poorer Health.” Since then, average life expectancy in the U.S. has only dropped further. “There is some good news, including that drug overdose deaths are finally falling,” Valles told Salon by email. “But the overall picture is dire. As a Commonwealth Fund report puts it, compared to other high-income countries, ‘The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality, and among the highest suicide rates.’” None of this started with the Trump administration, not even the first one, though the decline has clearly accelerated in just a few months. As Daniella Barreto, host and producer of the podcast “Public Health is Dead,” explained, “The Biden administration paved the way for the further destruction of public health when they decided, in a feat of circular logic, that the COVID pandemic was over because they said so. People latched on to that because they wanted it to be true.” Barreto gave numerous examples, from how testing was severely limited under Biden, which meant less data to track the SARS-CoV-2 virus, to how in 2021 the CDC was lobbied by airline business interests to shorten COVID isolation guidelines or how the agency’s then director, Rochelle Walensky, said that masks were a “scarlet letter.” “The push for ‘back to normal’ and short-term profits for corporations have come at the expense of everyone’s long-term health, including children’s,” Barreto told Salon by email. Congress also bears a lot of responsibility for how public health has been starved, Love said. “Simply because Biden was President did not give him ultimate authority to repair a lot of infrastructure that had been eroded,” Love explained. “For example, the USDA/FDA budget and personnel cuts from Trump's first term have led to reduction in workforce to conduct food safety inspections that aren’t able to be corrected quickly — especially when the Congress did not allocate more funding to these agencies. RFK Jr’s claims that his gutting of health agencies will improve public health are objectively false — we know that things that will improve public health, and halting funding for critical interventions, research, community outreach/education, and global health will do the opposite.” Love said that by rejecting public health and defunding the scientific research that is its foundation, “we are all going to become less safe, less healthy, and less secure.” Indeed, many people are at greater risk of disability or death from these policies — not just at home, but across the globe. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the WHO and the dismantling of USAID and other essential programs will have ripple effects. As the CDC puts in their guide to global health security, “In today's interconnected world, a disease threat anywhere is a threat everywhere – and outbreaks can disrupt American lives and livelihoods even if they never reach America's shores.” Which makes a recent finding by the World Health Organization — that almost 75% of U.N. countries have experienced severe disruptions to health services — somewhat rattling. “The rhetoric from this administration takes the mentality that health is an 'individual' issue, and not shaped by social determinants of health and societal initiatives,” Love said. “Health issues do not adhere to country boundaries, especially when we are talking about infectious diseases. I do worry that this damage will cause generational, perhaps irreparable harm, as the U.S. erasing its own scientific institutions but also the collaborative ecosystem globally will have far reaching effects.” In Barreto’s opinion, that’s precisely the point. “The extreme cuts at HHS also impact environmental health, sexual health, and sexual violence prevention programs as well as health and safety regulatory bodies,” Barreto said. “I believe this administration is not unaware that the people who will bear the brunt of this are racialized, disabled, trans and otherwise marginalized.” If top-level public health basically doesn’t function anymore, where does that leave the public? At least 23 states and the District of Columbia are currently suing Kennedy and the HHS, The Guardian reported, “alleging the abrupt terminations of $11bn in public health funding were ‘harmful’ and 'unlawful.’” A judge later blocked these cuts. But more than staunching the bleeding is necessary, as Valles explained that public health improvements take hard work and investment. “Today, we need to be a period for rebuilding the public health workforce, so that we have the next generation of public health workers of all sorts, from community health workers who help people to sign up for benefits like food assistance for their children, to CDC researchers vigilantly watching for the next pandemic,” Valles said. “Instead, the federal government is now trying to lay off hundreds of probationary employees at the CDC, rescinding some of the layoffs, and now many of them are caught in legal limbo as courts decide whether their layoffs were illegal. Meanwhile, federal grants that support the work of public health around the US are being haphazardly canceled. This is not how to rebuild or reform an effective public health workforce, it is how to destroy one.” Love said we need to reclaim the importance of science, which “requires a systemic mindset shift that won’t happen until the misinformation spread by wellness profiteers is clamped down on.” She also emphasized the role of Congress, universities and the media to “push back” on these attacks. “It needs to be common knowledge what the consequences of these actions will be, even for people who think they aren’t going to be impacted,” Love said. “Without our government supporting these initiatives, we may need to turn to other sources of support. Other countries, philanthropic organizations. But that isn’t a substitute. It’s a band-aid on a broken bone.” As long as there is a public, there will be public health, Valles said. What shape it takes depends on a lot of things we can’t always control — social determinants of health like income and zip code — so without clear direction on the federal level, we have to begin more locally. “As a first step, I encourage U.S. readers to learn more about the health of their own communities,” Valles said. “Look up your county in the database of county-level health measures to how your county compares to state and national averages in things like percent of children experiencing poverty, access to opportunities for exercise, and breast cancer mammogram screening rates. If you enter your address on this website, you can see the life expectancy of people living in your neighborhood … Or go to this website to see a map of that data for neighborhoods across the U.S.” Ultimately, to slow the erosion of public health, it needs to be something that people generally value. It may seem insurmountable to get the Trump administration to reverse course, but it will only be possible if people demand it. “It’s easy to see what’s happening and feel defeated; it’s objectively awful,” Marino said. “But public health has always been fighting uphill battles without enough resources. And perhaps the hardest part has always been convincing the public to care about public health. I hope that people do not have to suffer and die for people to realize the value that public health provides, even when programs seem so distant. I guess we will see whether people care or not.” Read more about public health

There really is a way to make America healthy again. It's just not Kennedy's way

The greatest invention of the Industrial Age isn’t the iPhone or lithium-ion batteries or even the internal combustion engine — it’s public health. Unfortunately for our “see it to believe it” culture, public health works best when it’s practically invisible, just humming along in the background. Thus, there are few things Westerners take for granted more than reduced child mortality, reduced death in child birth and the eradication of history’s most brutal diseases like polio and smallpox.

Thankfully, very few of us know what it’s like to grow up with half our siblings dying from relatively minor infections or experiencing life-long disability from surviving an epidemic. Those days are behind us — or so some of us thought.

For anyone paying the slightest attention, it’s clear our global society is quickly devolving, reverting back to a time before antibiotics and widespread sanitation. It sounds extreme, but little else would explain the fixation on raw milk, for example. A combination of engrained ignorance and political interests is eroding the foundation of something that made our capitalist society possible in the first place. It’s hard to build an international trade empire if your customers are too sick to work or die often. 

Because we are so many generations removed from the people who coughed up bloody bits of the Black Death, it’s understandable human nature why so many of us refuse to acknowledge COVID-19 is a serious illness or think ditching vaccination is wise. Naïvety is intoxicating and no one likes confronting their own ableism or mortality. It’s these forces that are allowing us to grind basic tenets like germ theory and fluoridation into the woodchipper. It’s an astonishing level of reckless stupidity that we will be contending with for generations.

But let’s not get too sentimental about public health either. It’s far from a perfect system. We can think of it like a great oak, with many branches and deep roots. There’s no denying this tree has been poisoned by profit-seeking incentives that have produced giant, twisted branches like Big Pharma or health care insurance middlemen that profit from denying claims. In spite of this, it has helped people live longer, healthier lives compared to those over a century ago — and to fix the issues that plague it, we need to fertilize it, not chainsaw it down. But that’s exactly what we’re doing.

“Public health — and trust in public health — is being eroded in the U.S.,” Dr. Andrea Love, an immunologist and microbiologist, told Salon by email. “We are seeing rejection (and in some instances, legal action) against long-supported and evidence-based public health measures: vaccinations, pasteurization and food safety, water fluoridation. We are also seeing an erasure of investment and funding in research and health care infrastructure that focus on understanding and improving public health. It has been difficult as a scientist, science communicator, and member of this country to see this occurring when we have the most scientific knowledge we have ever had in human history.”

This is the kind of leadership at HHS these days: wasting resources attacking established science while dismantling the systems that protect against epidemics and research treatments.

It’s bad enough that the public is being gaslit about an ongoing measles outbreak that has so far spread across 25 states, infecting more than 700 people, with more than 540 in Texas alone. This epidemic, caused by a virus that was once eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, has claimed at least two lives: two children, one eight-years old and the other only six. The death of a New Mexico man who had measles is still under investigation. 

Despite a recent New York Times headline that suggests this is the "new normal," the resurgence of preventable disease is not a law of nature — it's literally a choice we, as a society, are making.

And so much more illness is on the rise, from Victorian-era diseases like tuberculosis to novel tropical diseases like “sloth fever.” The threat of another pandemic, be it bird flu or another COVID-19 surge are always present. But now Republican leadership wants us to pretend like none of this is happening while firing the people who track these sorts of things and gutting social safety nets like Social Security and Medicaid.

Last month, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced “a major restructuring” of the Health and Human Services Department, which has so far resulted in the mass layoff of about 10,000 federal health workers. At least eight top-level managers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have resigned in recent weeks, all while the agency has clawed back $11.4 billion in COVID-19 research dollars and suppressed a report on measles suggesting that individuals get vaccinated. Most recently, the Trump administration forced out Peter Marks, the nation’s top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration, who wrote in his resignation letter “It is unconscionable with measles outbreaks to not have a full-throated endorsement of measles vaccinations.”

Though Kennedy has recently said that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine is the best way to prevent infection and spread, this is in sharp contrast to his previous statements denying vaccine efficacy, including last week when he incorrectly stated that some vaccines “never worked.”

Maybe Kennedy wants to give lip service to the MMR shot after attending the funeral of an unvaccinated victim of the Texas measles outbreak, but actions speak louder than words: earlier this month, dozens of free measles vaccine clinics were shuttered in Texas due to federal funding cuts. And Kennedy still won’t let go of this ridiculous notion — debunked again and again — that vaccines are a cause of autism. That hasn’t stopped Health and Human Services from recently appointing a discredited vaccine skeptic to investigate this link. On April 10, Kennedy said we’d “know by September” what has “caused the autism epidemic.”

In a statement, Christopher Banks, CEO and president of the Autism Society of America, responded that Kennedy’s remarks are “both unrealistic and misleading,” adding that such efforts “risk undermining decades of progress and causing real harm to the autism community.”


Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes.


But this is the kind of leadership at HHS these days: wasting resources attacking established science while dismantling the systems that protect against epidemics and research treatments, not to mention denying people access to health care. The institutions monitoring, treating, researching and informing us about disease are now either broken, underfunded or pushing misinformation. It begs the question: is public health even a thing in this country anymore?

“As it currently stands, public health no longer exists at the federal level,” Dr. Ryan Marino, an emergency medicine physician at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, told Salon by email. “It’s still to be seen if this very intentional gutting of our public health institutions, infrastructure and funding will decimate state and regional public health but these ‘cuts’ in spending are likely to mean less services everywhere and for everyone.”

To illustrate how far back this trend goes, professor Sean Valles, director of the Center for Bioethics at Michigan State University, pointed to a 2013 report by the U.S. National Research Council and the U.S. Institute of Medicine, which summarizes the situation in its title: “Shorter Lives, Poorer Health.” Since then, average life expectancy in the U.S. has only dropped further.

“There is some good news, including that drug overdose deaths are finally falling,” Valles told Salon by email. “But the overall picture is dire. As a Commonwealth Fund report puts it, compared to other high-income countries, ‘The U.S. has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable or treatable conditions, the highest maternal and infant mortality, and among the highest suicide rates.’”

None of this started with the Trump administration, not even the first one, though the decline has clearly accelerated in just a few months. As Daniella Barreto, host and producer of the podcast “Public Health is Dead,” explained, “The Biden administration paved the way for the further destruction of public health when they decided, in a feat of circular logic, that the COVID pandemic was over because they said so. People latched on to that because they wanted it to be true.”

Barreto gave numerous examples, from how testing was severely limited under Biden, which meant less data to track the SARS-CoV-2 virus, to how in 2021 the CDC was lobbied by airline business interests to shorten COVID isolation guidelines or how the agency’s then director, Rochelle Walensky, said that masks were a “scarlet letter.”

“The push for ‘back to normal’ and short-term profits for corporations have come at the expense of everyone’s long-term health, including children’s,” Barreto told Salon by email.

Congress also bears a lot of responsibility for how public health has been starved, Love said.

“Simply because Biden was President did not give him ultimate authority to repair a lot of infrastructure that had been eroded,” Love explained. “For example, the USDA/FDA budget and personnel cuts from Trump's first term have led to reduction in workforce to conduct food safety inspections that aren’t able to be corrected quickly — especially when the Congress did not allocate more funding to these agencies. RFK Jr’s claims that his gutting of health agencies will improve public health are objectively false — we know that things that will improve public health, and halting funding for critical interventions, research, community outreach/education, and global health will do the opposite.”

Love said that by rejecting public health and defunding the scientific research that is its foundation, “we are all going to become less safe, less healthy, and less secure.”

Indeed, many people are at greater risk of disability or death from these policies — not just at home, but across the globe. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the WHO and the dismantling of USAID and other essential programs will have ripple effects. As the CDC puts in their guide to global health security, “In today's interconnected world, a disease threat anywhere is a threat everywhere – and outbreaks can disrupt American lives and livelihoods even if they never reach America's shores.” Which makes a recent finding by the World Health Organization — that almost 75% of U.N. countries have experienced severe disruptions to health services — somewhat rattling.

“The rhetoric from this administration takes the mentality that health is an 'individual' issue, and not shaped by social determinants of health and societal initiatives,” Love said. “Health issues do not adhere to country boundaries, especially when we are talking about infectious diseases. I do worry that this damage will cause generational, perhaps irreparable harm, as the U.S. erasing its own scientific institutions but also the collaborative ecosystem globally will have far reaching effects.”

In Barreto’s opinion, that’s precisely the point. “The extreme cuts at HHS also impact environmental health, sexual health, and sexual violence prevention programs as well as health and safety regulatory bodies,” Barreto said. “I believe this administration is not unaware that the people who will bear the brunt of this are racialized, disabled, trans and otherwise marginalized.”

If top-level public health basically doesn’t function anymore, where does that leave the public? At least 23 states and the District of Columbia are currently suing Kennedy and the HHS, The Guardian reported, “alleging the abrupt terminations of $11bn in public health funding were ‘harmful’ and 'unlawful.’” A judge later blocked these cuts. But more than staunching the bleeding is necessary, as Valles explained that public health improvements take hard work and investment.

“Today, we need to be a period for rebuilding the public health workforce, so that we have the next generation of public health workers of all sorts, from community health workers who help people to sign up for benefits like food assistance for their children, to CDC researchers vigilantly watching for the next pandemic,” Valles said. “Instead, the federal government is now trying to lay off hundreds of probationary employees at the CDC, rescinding some of the layoffs, and now many of them are caught in legal limbo as courts decide whether their layoffs were illegal. Meanwhile, federal grants that support the work of public health around the US are being haphazardly canceled. This is not how to rebuild or reform an effective public health workforce, it is how to destroy one.”

Love said we need to reclaim the importance of science, which “requires a systemic mindset shift that won’t happen until the misinformation spread by wellness profiteers is clamped down on.” She also emphasized the role of Congress, universities and the media to “push back” on these attacks.

“It needs to be common knowledge what the consequences of these actions will be, even for people who think they aren’t going to be impacted,” Love said. “Without our government supporting these initiatives, we may need to turn to other sources of support. Other countries, philanthropic organizations. But that isn’t a substitute. It’s a band-aid on a broken bone.”

As long as there is a public, there will be public health, Valles said. What shape it takes depends on a lot of things we can’t always control — social determinants of health like income and zip code — so without clear direction on the federal level, we have to begin more locally.

“As a first step, I encourage U.S. readers to learn more about the health of their own communities,” Valles said. “Look up your county in the database of county-level health measures to how your county compares to state and national averages in things like percent of children experiencing poverty, access to opportunities for exercise, and breast cancer mammogram screening rates. If you enter your address on this website, you can see the life expectancy of people living in your neighborhood … Or go to this website to see a map of that data for neighborhoods across the U.S.”

Ultimately, to slow the erosion of public health, it needs to be something that people generally value. It may seem insurmountable to get the Trump administration to reverse course, but it will only be possible if people demand it.

“It’s easy to see what’s happening and feel defeated; it’s objectively awful,” Marino said. “But public health has always been fighting uphill battles without enough resources. And perhaps the hardest part has always been convincing the public to care about public health. I hope that people do not have to suffer and die for people to realize the value that public health provides, even when programs seem so distant. I guess we will see whether people care or not.”

Read more

about public health

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Living Near Polluted Missouri Creek as a Child Tied to Later Cancer Risk

By I. Edwards HealthDay ReporterTHURSDAY, July 17, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Folks who grew up near a polluted Missouri creek during the 1940s...

THURSDAY, July 17, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Folks who grew up near a polluted Missouri creek during the 1940s through 1960s may have higher odds for cancer now, new research shows.The study focused on Coldwater Creek in St. Louis County. The area was contaminated with radioactive waste from the U.S. government’s atomic bomb program during World War II.Back then, uranium was processed in St. Louis and nuclear waste was stored near the city’s airport. That waste leaked into Coldwater Creek, which runs through several residential neighborhoods.Researchers found that people who lived within one kilometer (0.62 miles) of the creek as kids had an 85% higher risk of developing certain cancers later in life compared to those who lived more than 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) away.Those cancers include leukemia, thyroid cancer and breast cancer, which are known to be linked to radiation exposure.“The closer the childhood residence got to Coldwater Creek, the risk of cancer went up, and pretty dramatically," lead researcher Marc Weisskopf, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told The Wall Street Journal.For the study, Weisskopf’s team surveyed more than 4,200 adults who lived in the St. Louis area as children between 1958 and 1970.These people had donated their baby teeth years ago for radiation research. The new survey asked about cancer and other health issues.About 1 in 4 participants said they had been diagnosed with cancer. Risk dropped the farther someone lived from the creek as a child.Outside experts who reviewed the findings described them as concerning.“It emphasizes the importance of appreciating that radioactive waste is carcinogenic, particularly to children, and that we have to ensure that we have to clean up any remaining waste that’s out there,” Dr. Rebecca Smith-Bindman, a radiation risk expert at the University of California, San Francisco, told The Journal.In 2024, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began placing warning signs along parts of the creek that still have radioactive waste, The Journal reported.The U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry reported in 2019 that contamination have raised the risk of leukemia and lung and bone cancer. Later exposures, starting in the 2000s, were linked to a slight increase in lung cancer for those who lived nearby.But the agency said it’s hard to link any one person’s cancer directly to radiation. Genetics, lifestyle and other factors could also play a role.In this study, radiation exposure wasn’t directly measured. Cancer cases were also self-reported, not confirmed by medical records. Weisskopf plans to measure radiation levels using the stored baby teeth in future research.Radiation exposure has long been tied to cancer, but this study is among the first to look at lower, long-term environmental exposure in the U.S., not just high levels from nuclear disasters or bombings."Radiation, when it’s given unnecessarily, only causes risk," Dr. Howard Sandler, chair of radiation oncology at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, told The Journal.SOURCE: The Wall Street Journal, July 16, 2025Copyright © 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Disposable Vapes Release Toxic Metals, Lab Study Says

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterFRIDAY, July 11, 2025 (HealthDay News) — People using cheap disposable vape devices are likely inhaling high...

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterFRIDAY, July 11, 2025 (HealthDay News) — People using cheap disposable vape devices are likely inhaling high levels of toxic metals with every puff, a recent study says.After a few hundred puffs, some disposable vapes start releasing levels of toxic metals higher than found in either last-generation refillable e-cigarettes or traditional tobacco smokes, researchers reported in the journal ACS Central Science.These metals can increase a person’s risk of cancer, lung disease and nerve damage, researchers said.“Our study highlights the hidden risk of these new and popular disposable electronic cigarettes — with hazardous levels of neurotoxic lead and carcinogenic nickel and antimony — which stresses the need for urgency in enforcement,” senior researcher Brett Poulin, an assistant professor of environmental toxicology at the University of California-Davis, said in a news release.Earlier studies found that the heating elements of refillable vapes could release metals like chromium and nickel into the vapor people breathe.For this study, researchers analyzed seven disposable devices from three well-known vape brands: ELF Bars, Flum Pebbles and Esco Bar.Before they were even used, some of the devices had surprisingly high levels of lead and antimony, researchers reported. The lead appears to have come from leaded copper alloys used in the devices, which leach into the e-liquid.The team then activated the disposable vapes, creating between 500 and 1,500 puffs for each device, to see whether their heating elements would release more metals.Analysis of the vapor revealed that:Levels of metals like chromium, nickel and antimony increased as the number of puffs increased, while concentrations of zinc, copper and lead were elevated at the start. Most of the tested disposables released higher amounts of metals than older refillable vapes. One disposable released more lead during a day’s use than one would get from nearly 20 packs of tobacco cigarettes. Nickel in three devices and antimony in two devices exceeded cancer risk limits. Four devices had nickel and lead emissions that surpassed health risk thresholds for diseases other than cancer. These results reflect only three of the nearly 100 disposable vape brands now available on store shelves, researchers noted.“Coupling the high element exposures and health risks associated with these devices and their prevalent use among the underage population, there is an urgent need for regulators to investigate this issue further and exercise regulatory enforcement accordingly,” researchers wrote.SOURCES: American Chemical Society, news release, June 20, 2025; ACS Central Science, June 25, 2025Copyright © 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Trying to Quit Smoking? These Expert-Backed Tips Can Help

By David Hill, MD, Chair, Board of Directors, American Lung Association HealthDay ReporterTHURSDAY, July 10, 2025 (HealthDay News) — According to...

THURSDAY, July 10, 2025 (HealthDay News) — According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2022, the majority of the 28.8 million U.S. adults who smoked cigarettes wanted to quit; approximately half had tried to quit, but fewer than 10% were successful.Many folks say quitting smoking was the hardest thing they have ever done. This includes people who have climbed mountains, corporate ladders, tackled childbirth and raised families.Successfully overcoming tobacco addiction is a process, and it takes time. It can’t be done at once. Individuals taught themselves how to smoke, vape or chew tobacco products and practiced for so long that the behavior became as automatic as breathing, eating or sleeping.Quitting, then, is a process of overcoming addiction and learned behaviors. Individuals must learn to manage nicotine addiction, unlearn their automatic behavior of tobacco use, and replace it with healthy new alternatives.Because tobacco dependence is a chronic relapsing condition, Freedom From Smoking® identifies quitting tobacco use and maintaining abstinence as a process in which a person may cycle through multiple periods of relapse and remission before experiencing long-term lifestyle and behavior change.The CDC suggests that it takes eight to 11 attempts before quitting permanently.It’s essential to understand three challenges associated with quitting and create a plan to address each with proven-effective strategies:1. Psychological Link of Nicotine Addiction Over time, using tobacco products becomes an automatic behavior that needs to be unlearned.  After quitting, emotions can overwhelm a person.  Grief can also play an important role in the quitting process.  Create support systems through counseling classes, and among family, friends and co-workers. Mark a calendar for every day you are tobacco-free and reward yourself for days you avoid use. Use positive self-talk when cravings arise, such as “the urge will pass whether I smoke or not” or “smoking is not an option for me.”2. Sociocultural Link of Nicotine AddictionCertain activities and environmental cues can trigger the urge to smoke. As people mature, social factors or cues play a role in continuing use.  People who use tobacco may be reluctant to give up those connections or routines.  Identify your triggers and use replacements such as cinnamon sticks, doodling on a notepad or finding another activity to keep your hands busy. Create change and break routine by using the 3 A’s — AVOID (the situation), ALTER (the situation) or ALTERNATIVE (substitute something else). Keep a quit kit/survival kit with you at all times with items you can use to replace tobacco product use when the urge comes.3. Biological (Physical) Link of Nicotine AddictionAddiction occurs when a substance — like nicotine, alcohol or cocaine — enters the brain and activates the brain’s receptors for that substance, producing pleasure.  When a person quits, the brain’s nicotine receptors activate, creating cravings and withdrawal symptoms.  Over time, the receptors become inactive, and the withdrawal symptoms and urges to use fade away. Use cessation medications approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (prescription or over-the-counter) in the proper doses for the full time period recommended by a clinician. Do not stop treatment early. Exercise alternative ways to release dopamine such as physical activity or listening to music.  Use stress management techniques, including deep breathing and relaxation exercises, daily if possible.Nearly 2 in 3 adults who have ever smoked cigarettes have successfully quit, according to the CDC You can, too! To learn more about strategies for countering the challenges associated with the three-link chain of nicotine addiction, visit Quit Smoking & Vaping | American Lung Association.Dr. David Hill is a member of the Lung Association's National Board of Directors and is the immediate past chair of the Northeast Regional Board of the American Lung Association. He serves on the Leadership Board of the American Lung Association in Connecticut and is a former chair of that board. He is a practicing pulmonary and critical care physician with Waterbury Pulmonary Associates and serves as their director of clinical research. He is an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine, an assistant clinical professor at the Frank Netter School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University, and a clinical instructor at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine.Copyright © 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Lead Exposure Can Harm Kids' Memory, Study Says

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterTHURSDAY, July 10, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Even low levels of lead exposure can harm kids' working memory,...

By Dennis Thompson HealthDay ReporterTHURSDAY, July 10, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Even low levels of lead exposure can harm kids' working memory, potentially affecting their education and development, according to a new study.Exposure to lead in the womb or during early childhood appears to increase kids' risk of memory decay, accelerating the rate at which they forget information, researchers reported July 9 in the journal Science Advances.“There may be no more important a trait than the ability to form memories. Memories define who we are and how we learn,” said senior researcher Dr. Robert Wright, chair of environmental medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.“This paper breaks new ground by showing how environmental chemicals can interfere with the rate of memory formation,” Wright said in a news release.For the study, researchers took blood lead measurements from the mothers of 576 children in Mexico during the second and third trimester of pregnancy. Later, the team took samples directly from the kids themselves, at ages 4 to 6.Between 6 and 8 years of age, the kids took a test called the delayed matching-to-sample task, or DMST, to measure their rate of forgetting.In the test, kids had to remember a simple shape for up to 32 seconds after it had been briefly shown to them, and then choose it from three offered options.The test lasted for 15 minutes, with correct responses rewarding the child with tokens that could be exchanged for a toy at the end of the experiment.“Children with higher levels of blood lead forgot the test stimulus faster than those with low blood lead levels,” Wright said.Researchers noted that the Mexican children in the study had higher median blood lead levels than those typically found in U.S. kids 6 to 10 years old – 1.7 Ug/dL versus 0.5 Ug/dL. (Median means half were higher, half were lower.)Children in Mexico are exposed to lead through commonly used lead-glazed ceramics used to cook, store and serve food, researchers said.However, the Mexican kids’ blood lead levels were still lower than the 3.5 Ug/dL level used by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to identify kids in the United States with more lead exposure than others, researchers added.“In the U.S., the reduction of environmental exposures to lead, such as lead-based paint in homes, lead pipes, and lead in foods such as spices, is still of continued importance as even low levels of lead can have detrimental effects on children’s cognitive function and development,” researchers wrote in their paper.This study also shows that the DMST test can be used to help test the effect of other environmental hazards on kids’ memory, researchers said.“Children are exposed to many environmental chemicals, and this model provides a validated method to further assess the effect of additional environmental exposures, such as heavy metals, air pollution, or endocrine disruptors, on children’s working memory,” co-lead researcher Katherine Svensson, a postdoctoral fellow in environmental medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said in a news release.SOURCES: Mount Sinai, news release, July 9, 2025; Science Advances, July 9, 2025Copyright © 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Nearly Half of Americans Still Live With High Levels of Air Pollution, Posing Serious Health Risks, Report Finds

The most recent State of the Air report by the American Lung Association found that more than 150 million Americans breathe air with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution

Nearly Half of Americans Still Live With High Levels of Air Pollution, Posing Serious Health Risks, Report Finds The most recent State of the Air report by the American Lung Association found that more than 150 million Americans breathe air with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution Lillian Ali - Staff Contributor April 25, 2025 12:50 p.m. For 25 of the 26 years the American Lung Association has reported State of the Air, Los Angeles—pictured here in smog—has been declared the city with the worst ozone pollution in the United States. David Iliff via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 3.0 Since 2000, the American Lung Association has released an annual State of the Air report analyzing air quality data across the United States. This year’s report, released on Wednesday, found the highest number of people exposed to unhealthy levels of air pollution in a decade. According to the findings, 156 million Americans—or 46 percent of the U.S. population—live with levels of particle or ozone pollution that received a failing grade. “Both these types of pollution cause people to die,” Mary Rice, a pulmonologist at Harvard University, tells NPR’s Alejandra Borunda. “They shorten life expectancy and drive increases in asthma rates.” Particle pollution, also called soot pollution, is made up of minuscule solid and liquid particles that hang in the air. They’re often emitted by fuel combustion, like diesel- and gasoline-powered cars or the burning of wood. Ozone pollution occurs when polluting gases are hit by sunlight, leading to a reaction that forms ozone smog. Breathing in ozone can irritate your lungs, causing shortness of breath, coughing or asthma attacks. The 2025 State of the Air report, which analyzed air quality data from 2021 to 2023, found 25 million more people breathing polluted air compared to the 2024 report. The authors link this rise to climate change. “There’s definitely a worsening trend that’s driven largely by climate change,” Katherine Pruitt, the lead author of the report and national senior director for policy at the American Lung Association, tells USA Today’s Ignacio Calderon. “Every year seems to be a bit hotter globally, resulting in more extreme weather events, more droughts, more extreme heat and more wildfires.” Those wildfires produce the sooty particles that contribute to particulate pollution, while extreme heat creates more favorable conditions for ozone formation, producing smog. While climate change is contributing to heavy air pollution, it used to be much worse. Smog has covered cities like Los Angeles since the early 20th century. At one point, these “hellish clouds” of smog were so thick that, in the middle of World War II, residents thought the city was under attack. The Optimist Club of Highland Park, a neighborhood in northeast Los Angleles, wore gas masks at a 1954 banquet to highlight air pollution in the city. Los Angeles Daily News via Wikimedia Commons under CC-BY 4.0 The passage of the Clean Air Act and the creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 marked a turning point in air quality, empowering the government to regulate pollution and promote public health. Now, six key air pollutants have dropped by about 80 percent since the law’s passage, according to this year’s report. But some researchers see climate change as halting—or even reversing—this improvement. “Since the act passed, the air pollution has gone down overall,” Laura Kate Bender, an assistant vice president at the American Lung Association, tells CBS News’ Kiki Intarasuwan. “The challenge is that over the last few years, we’re starting to see it tick back up again, and that’s because of climate change, in part.” At the same time, federal action against climate change appears to be slowing. On March 12, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced significant rollbacks and re-evaluations, declaring it “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen.” Zeldin argued that his deregulation will drive “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” Included in Zeldin’s push for deregulation is a re-evaluation of Biden-era air quality standards, including those for particulate pollution and greenhouse gases. The EPA provided a list of 31 regulations it plans to scale back or eliminate, including limits on air pollution, mercury emissions and vehicles. This week, the EPA sent termination notices to nearly 200 employees at the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. “Unfortunately, we see that everything that makes our air quality better is at risk,” Kate Bender tells CBS News, citing the regulation rollbacks and cuts to staff and funding at the EPA. “If we see all those cuts become reality, it’s gonna have a real impact on people’s health by making the air they breathe dirtier.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

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