Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a new policy on Friday that ends over 50 years of public involvement in the department’s rulemaking process by eliminating public comments in certain cases. Under this policy, the department is no longer required to hold a public notice-and-comment period after publishing proposed rules on matters “relating to agency…
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The Trump administration’s attempt to freeze all federal grants, including those at the National Institutes of Health, has been temporarily blocked since late last month, when two federal judges ruled that President Donald Trump did not have the authority to pull back the funding — but new reporting on Friday detailed how the administration has circumvented the rulings…
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The United States is experiencing the peak of one of the worst flu seasons in years. COVID-19 infection rates are also elevated in many parts of the country, and officials in Canada and the U.S. are stockpiling a new vaccine to protect farmworkers from bird flu as the outbreak, which is causing the price of eggs to skyrocket, intensifies in the dairy and poultry industries. We have a snapshot…
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For decades, scientists and medical workers have warned that even low levels of lead in human blood can have a deleterious impact on health. But that has not stopped the Trump administration from threatening to end the few measures that currently attempt to limit exposure to a wide range of toxicants, including lead. Public health advocates nationwide collectively breathed a sigh of relief…
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Sonya Stokes, an emergency room physician in the San Francisco Bay Area, braces herself for a daily deluge of patients sick with coughs, soreness, fevers, vomiting, and other flu-like symptoms. She’s desperate for information, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a critical source of urgent analyses of the flu and other public health threats, has gone quiet in the weeks since…
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Remember “alternative facts”? It’s been eight years since Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, uttered those words during a “Meet the Press” interview. The patently Orwellian phrase set off a firestorm of coverage: According to Conway, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer wasn’t lying when he said Trump had drawn “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration,”…
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Just over two weeks into Donald Trump’s second presidential term, his intentions are clear: to weaken and destroy the federal government. He has already unconstitutionally usurped congressional power and given Elon Musk’s unelected team complete access to the Treasury’s payment system, while taking a hatchet to longstanding, life-saving federal institutions. We are witnessing a blatant attempt to…
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has called on the Senate to reject Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination to the top health position in the U.S., calling out Kennedy’s blatant lies on vaccines that health experts have repeatedly said could endanger lives across the country. In a statement on his “no” vote for Kennedy’s nomination for Health and Human Services Secretary on Tuesday…
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The fallout from President Donald Trump’s “shock and awe” campaign to bend the federal government to his will is becoming painfully apparent. Doctors and advocates report that that the slew of new executive orders are already causing disruptions in treatment, all while Republicans in Congress consider spending cuts that analysts say could strip coverage for millions and spin the health system into…
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War isn’t just destroyed buildings and displaced populations; it is a humanitarian tragedy that leaves behind long-term physical consequences on individuals and communities. Repeated Israeli attacks on hospitals and the heavy Israeli restrictions on aid entering Gaza over the past 15 months have left the healthcare sector unable to provide necessary medical care due to a lack of medical and…
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President Donald Trump and his right-wing allies have made it clear they intend to do as much damage to the federal government as possible. Trump has promised to diminish, defund and defang federal regulatory bodies — proposals that are echoed in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s far right blueprint for the next four years. During his first week in office, Trump issued 70 executive orders…
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Faced with a silent but widespread threat to public health, environmental groups applauded the Biden administration for taking major steps to regulate and remove toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” from drinking water used by millions of people across the United States. During his first week in office, President Donald Trump began reversing this progress while installing chemical industry insiders to…
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The life expectancy among Native Americans in the western United States has dropped below 64 years, close to life expectancies in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Haiti. For many Asian Americans, it’s around 84 — on par with life expectancies in Japan and Switzerland. Americans’ health has long been unequal, but a new study shows that the disparity between the life expectancies of…
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The man tapped by President Donald Trump to be second-in-command of the federal agency that protects the public from environmental dangers is a lawyer who has represented companies accused of harming people and the environment through pollution. David Fotouhi, a partner in the global law firm Gibson Dunn, played a key part in rolling back climate regulations and water protections while…
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In one of his first executive orders after taking office, President Trump ordered the United States to withdraw from the U.N.’s World Health Organization, putting numerous WHO programs at risk, including efforts to tackle tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS. Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, says the move is a “grave mistake for American national interests and our…
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Almost 100 million people in the US may be exposed to unregulated industrial chemicals in their drinking water, with communities of color especially at risk, according to a new analysis of federal monitoring data for water systems across the country. The study, published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, analyzed data gathered by the US Environmental Protection…
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It’s not uncommon for Canadian dentist Brandon Doucet to see patients who are in so much pain that they’ve tried to extract their own teeth. As a dental student, Doucet was inspired by Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign and realized that he needed to take action where he was, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In 2019, Doucet founded a group called the Coalition for Dental Care to advocate…
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The incendiary cataclysms in Los Angeles, California remind us that the root cause of the climate crisis exacerbating the fires spreading throughout that city and surrounding areas is fossil fuel production emblematic of runaway capitalism fueled by white “supremacy” ideology, patriarchy, and colonization. And while it’s easy to focus solely on the fires, it’s important to note that the associated smoke will be the main culprit in the loss of life due to environmental racism that has assaulted the public health of Black, Brown, Indigenous and all poor and working class people in Los Angeles and throughout the country.
The post Los Angeles Fires: The Santa Ana Blowback of Capitalist Climate Change Neglect appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
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We might have just rung in a new year, but it feels like an epidemiological Groundhog Day. Nearly five years since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, public health experts are once again sounding the alarm. This time, it’s the H5N1 virus — also known as avian influenza, or bird flu — that’s causing concern. Even though federal officials have had ample time to stymie the spread…
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Dangerously high levels of the cancer-causing chemical benzene continue to plague Channelview, Texas, despite warnings from state regulators that began almost 20 years ago. Data collected during the state’s most recent air monitoring trips include one benzene reading that was three times the Texas hourly guideline, the weakest in the nation. In two instances, benzene fumes were so strong…
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The Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency on Monday announced a permanent ban on a pair of carcinogenic chemicals widely used in U.S. industries, including dry cleaning services and automative work. According to the Washington Post: Jonathan Kalmuss-Katz, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, applauded the move but suggested to the Post that it should have come sooner.
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Rana Nabeel Baalousha is a 23-year-old woman with a beautiful face that reflects deep compassion. She is imprisoned in a slender and frail body, clinging to the hope of experiencing just one day of normalcy. Amid the relentless atrocities of war that have ravaged Gaza for more than 400 soul-crushing days, Rana strives to survive. For five long years, Rana has been battling a rare…
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Half of people with HIV in the United States are living in places that are vulnerable to extreme weather and climate disasters, according to a new analysis from the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP). The report from CAP released Wednesday finds that the areas of the country where HIV is being diagnosed at disproportionately high rates are also places most at risk of disasters.
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More than 143 million people in the United States may be exposed to toxic “forever chemicals” in their drinking water, according to a new analysis of water testing data. The findings come as environmentalists fear that the incoming Trump administration will weaken or repeal tough new standards designed to protect public health. Under new rules set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)…
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Valerie Huber has had a busy couple of years. Since leaving her senior post in the US government, the former Trump official has spent months traveling across Africa, from Burkina Faso to Uganda, meeting officials and heads of state from at least nine countries. Social media posts show her gladhanding ambassadors and smiling with politicians, making public her commitment to promote women’s…
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President elect Donald Trump says he plans to give Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a “big role” in health care in the new administration and let him “go wild” on health, food and medicine. Although Trump hasn’t confirmed what that role would be or what precisely “going wild” means, Kennedy could potentially be elected to any number of leadership positions in the administration, including as the commissioner…
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A decade ago, an old work injury put Fred Blackman II in the hospital with a slipped spinal disc that threatened to paralyze him. The Austin, Texas, minister spent the next five months there, enduring five back surgeries, extreme pain and a brain infection. He almost died. After discharge, he returned to a life he didn’t recognize. He’d lost his job at an insurance company…
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Investigators have been busy at the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, the independent federal agency tasked with determining the root causes of major chemical accidents at industrial facilities. In Georgia, fallout is continuing more than two weeks after a massive chemical fire erupted at the BioLab pool and spa supply facility in Conyers, just outside of Atlanta. The fire created a toxic plume of…
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On October 8, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a landmark rule aimed at tackling lead contamination in drinking water. Utility companies are now required to identify and replace their lead pipes within the next 10 years, the EPA announced, and the threshold for acceptable lead levels in drinking water has been lowered from 15 to 10 parts per billion — the strictest guidelines…
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Late last month, news outlets reported that drug overdose deaths across the country were “falling fast,” in a “promising” trend that is “saving thousands of lives — But many people working on the ground in harm reduction spaces say the national trend does not align with what they are seeing as they continue to watch people who use drugs in their community die at alarming rates.
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