We can cut this death rate with early and consistent prenatal care, research has shown. Still, a new report published by the CDC shows that the U.S. is not trending in a positive direction to do so. After years of progress, fewer pregnant Americans are getting prenatal care in the first weeks of pregnancy — or getting access to care at all. The data highlights a bigger story in America: that timely reproductive care is getting harder to access, despite the current administration stating that it wants Americans to have “more babies.”

Per the CDC analysis, first-trimester prenatal care increased from 77.1 percent in 2016 to 78.3 percent in 2021. But from 2021 to 2024, prenatal care starting in the first trimester declined to 75.5 percent. The decline in early prenatal care was highest for Black mothers, where first-trimester care fell from 69.7 percent in 2021 to 65.1 percent in 2024. Overall, between 2021 and 2024, late or no care increased in 36 states and Washington, D.C.

Dr. Melissa Simon, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Northwestern Medicine, told Salon that women-related health policies over the past five years have not had a positive trend for “fostering good health and vitality” for women. For example, on June 24, 2022, the SCOTUS ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — a case that challenged a Mississippi ban on abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy — overturned Roe v. Wade, which effectively ended the federal constitutional right to choose to have an abortion in the United States.

Since then, 13 states have completely banned access to abortion, and six more have implemented restrictive laws that make access nearly impossible. Restrictive abortion laws have led to provider shortages in states, resulting in subsidized clinic shutdowns, an increase in infant deaths, and pregnancies with complications, including death. Since the pandemic, Simon added, there has been “a tsunami of disinformation that has promulgated distrust in health care and science, which also makes people less likely to seek health care, let alone prenatal care,” she said.

Dr. David Hackney, a maternal fetal medicine specialist, told Salon that abortion bans may not be directly causing the trend, but they’re still part of a bigger story of an attack on access to health care for women.

“Although abortion restrictions may or may not be causative, the consequences of late prenatal care initiation in restrictive states are greater,” Hackney said. “For patients who may need to travel out of state for abortion care, early prenatal care initiation allows for earlier recognition of concerns which as maternal medical problems or fetal genetic or structural anomalies.”

Early prenatal care not only consistently improves obstetric outcomes, he said, but is also “a primary tool to mitigate the risks of abortion bans.”

Notably, nationwide, more than one-third of the U.S. is now considered to be a maternity care desert, leaving more than 5.6 million women in counties with no or limited access to maternity care. Hackney told Salon the rise in maternity deserts is most likely a factor to the decline in early prenatal care.

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“A county that is in a maternity care desert not only lacks a labor and delivery unit, but also has no outpatient prenatal care provider at all, such that for prenatal care, a patient must drive into a neighboring county,” Hackney said. “As such deserts have expanded, patients in the first trimester have had to drive further, and thus it is unsurprising that early initiation is decreasing.”

Loss of insurance coverage, specifically Medicaid, among young women could be a contributing factor. Between ages 25 and 34, women are 69 percent more likely than men of the same age to live in poverty and possibly not be employed, meaning no access to private health insurance and a provider if they’re pregnant.

“Unfortunately, it would be anticipated that this problem will worsen in the coming years under the current administration, as Medicaid coverage continues to be intentionally curtailed and decreasing hospital support leads to growing maternity care deserts,” Hackney said.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to Salon’s request for a comment on how the administration plans to increase access to early prenatal care across the country to improve maternal mortality outcomes.

Simon noted that under the current administration, with restrictive immigration laws, there is “fear” to engage in health care “around immigration and refugee status.”

The current Trump administration rescinded an ICE policy that prohibited the agency’s activities in “protected areas” such as hospitals and medical facilities. Pregnant and breastfeeding women have commonly been detained in ICE facilities.

“Delayed prenatal care has serious consequences for both mothers and babies,”  Dr. Kim Bruno, associate director at Sera Prognostics, told Salon. “Early visits are essential for identifying and managing conditions like hypertension, diabetes, infections and fetal growth restriction. When care begins late, or not at all, clinicians miss the window to manage these risks effectively.”

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Yet, under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership, a vaccine advisory committee, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), recently announced plans to conduct a “comprehensive review” of the vaccine’s efficacy, effectiveness and safety. Specifically, it will discuss the “wording of the age for routine HPV vaccination,” vaccination schedule, and draft policy recommendations.

Kennedy, who founded an anti-vaccine non-profit, Children’s Health Defense, has personally attacked the HPV vaccine. In 2021, Kennedy called the Gardasil vaccine “dangerous and defective,” falsely saying that it increases the risk of cervical cancer. Kennedy once earned referral fees from Wisner Baum, a lawfirm known for its litigation against vaccine companies, which is currently suing the biotech giant Merck, alleging the company failed to properly warn the public about risks from its HPV vaccine. Following backlash, Kennedy has since distanced himself from Wisner Baum, but turned his stake over to his son Conor Kennedy, who works at the law firm.

Last month, Senators Edward Markey, D-Mass., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., wrote to Kennedy and Attorney General Pam Bondi, demanding he recuse himself from work related to vaccine injury compensation.

“You appear to be undertaking a dangerous backroom overhaul of the vaccine courts that is hidden from public scrutiny and raises significant conflict of interest concerns,” the lawmakers wrote. “The direct financial stake your family and Wisner Baum may have in pending vaccine litigation casts a cloud over any changes you may make to VICP,” referring to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Medical experts agree that the HPV vaccine does not need further scrutiny.

“Cervical cancer is largely caused by HPV, and therefore any forced ‘re-review’ is not based on any new scientific evidence,” Dr. Melissa Simon, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Northwestern Medicine, told Salon. Instead, such a “review” by the re-populated committee “is purely based on ideology and political whim,” she said. “It is disheartening, and further provides evidence to the public and American people that HHS does not have true concern for protecting the health of women and girls based on scientific evidence.”

Since its approval in 2006, the HPV vaccine has long been stigmatized and demonized due to its connection with sexual activity. Between 70 and 80 percent of all sexually active people will at some point contract the HPV virus, which is transmitted via skin-to-skin contact. Most types of HPV are harmless, while some are linked to an increased risk of certain types of cancer, including cervical cancer. The Gardasil 9 HPV vaccine protects against types of HPV that can cause cancers of the mouth, throat, vulva, vagina, penis and anus.

“It’s always faced slightly challenging connotations, because it is preventing a sexually transmitted infection,” Helen Bedford, a professor of children’s health at University College London, told Salon. “For some parents, they feel, well, my daughter is very young, and why do I need to protect them against a sexually transmitted infection?”

People typically clear the virus on their own and often don’t even know they’ve been infected. But in some people, HPV remains in the body and may cause several types of cancer. Some people believed that the vaccine could cause young girls to become sexually active at a young age — but multiple studies have debunked this.

While details on how the ACIP committee plans to revisit the “wording of age” are still being worked out, Bedford said it is better to be vaccinated younger. The U.S. has historically recommended two doses of the HPV vaccine before age 15 and three doses if they start after age 15. Vaccinations usually start at age 11 or 12, but can be as early as nine. In the United Kingdom, it’s offered around 12 and 13 years of age, and it’s usually part of a school-wide vaccination program.

“It’s always good to re-review vaccine programs, and it may be that it’s felt that if it were given slightly older, you might get higher uptake,” Bedford said. “But certainly in the U.K., it’s offered around 12 to 13. When it was first introduced, the uptake was very, very high.”

Bedford said vaccination rates have declined in the U.K. since the COVID-19 pandemic because schools were temporarily closed. But even for those who missed the window, adolescents can be vaccinated later in life and still be protected.

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ACIP said it also plans to reassess the vaccine’s safety and efficacy. But recent data substantiates that the vaccine is highly effective and safe. According to a modeling study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine earlier this month, those who were vaccinated between the ages of 12 and 24 may need cervical cancer screening only once every 15 to 25 years, suggesting that the vaccine coverage is so effective that cancer screenings could be reduced in a population.

In November 2025, Cochrane published their own review stating HPV vaccines are effective in preventing cervical cancer, especially when given to young people before they are exposed to the virus, and the vaccine has no “serious safety concerns.” According to a study from Public Health Scotland (PHS) published in 2024, there were no reported cervical cancer cases in fully vaccinated women who received the vaccine between the ages of 12 and 13, since the program started in Scotland in 2008.

In Kennedy’s revamped childhood vaccine schedule, the CDC is already recommending one dose of the HPV vaccine instead of two. The World Health Organization supports an off-label recommendation for a one-dose schedule based on recent efficacy data from single-dose trials. Doctors and researchers agree that one dose is fine in adolescents, but two to three doses are still recommended in older and immunocompromised populations.

“The scientific evidence shows that one dose is all that’s needed to confer immunity to adolescents to provide long-term protection against HPV that causes cervical cancer,” Simon said.

Bedford agreed.

“That itself is not a worrying move,” she said. “But of course, you know it’s how that’s recommended.”

If HPV vaccination rates fall, Bedford said it’s possible cervical cancer rates can rise.

“There’s always an opportunity for people to catch up later, which would be a good thing; if they don’t have it when they’re young, they might catch up later,” Bedford said. “But certainly if uptake falls, that’s a strong possibility, because we know that it is a very effective vaccine.”

Simon said that this is yet another example of Kennedy’s HHS undermining “well-established scientific processes and rigorous methodology for health care.” She said she fears that U.S. health care providers and patients “will not benefit from the knowledge of sound scientific evidence that our tax dollars and many agencies have invested in over decades to ensure the health of all Americans.”

From an international perspective, Bedford said, it’s been “horrifying” to watch.

“We’ve always looked to the United States to see how things are going in vaccine programs,” she said. “We know that, particularly with the HPV vaccine, the evidence is accumulating all the time about the value of this vaccine and how effective it is in preventing cancer.”

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The outbreak is centered around Spartanburg County in the state’s upstate region and reported a total of 789 cases. South Carolina surpassed the number of cases from the Texas outbreak in 2025 which reported 762 cases between late January to mid-August 2025.

The United States declared measles eliminated in 2000, which means “there are no locally transmitted measles infections or outbreaks lasting 12 months or longer,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The outbreak in South Carolina has lasted four months and the CDC reports there have been no new outbreaks across the country in 2026.

While the number of cases does not directly affect the elimination status, it can show a pattern of reduced vaccination and likelihood of more outbreaks. Of the 789 cases in South Carolina, 692 were reported as not vaccinated and nearly 70 percent of the reported cases were in children ages 0 to 11. The CDC reported the vaccination status of 93 percent of all cases reported in 2025 was unvaccinated or unknown.

The vaccination against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) is recommended in two doses beginning at 12 months of age. The Department of Health and Human Services announced at the beginning of the year it was changing the childhood vaccination schedule recommendations, removing five vaccinations from the list. The MMR vaccine continues to be recommended in the schedule, but comments from HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. undermined vaccination confidence in general, some experts say.

“There are adverse events from the vaccine. It does cause deaths every year,” Kennedy said in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity in March 2025, during the Texas outbreak. “It causes all the illnesses that measles itself causes, encephalitis and blindness, etc. And so people ought to be able to make that choice for themselves. And what we need to do is give them the best information, encourage them to vaccinate.”

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According to the Infectious Diseases Society of America, there have been no deaths related to the MMR vaccine in healthy people and deaths reported come from immunocompromised children who are not recommended to get the shot in the first place.

“The ongoing outbreak we are seeing in the U.S. underscores the importance of maintaining adequate levels of measles vaccination,” said William Moss, the International Vaccine Access Center’s executive director.

“The U.S. is at risk of losing its measles elimination status should cases continue at this rate. As vaccine confidence continues to be undermined, immunization is more important than ever to end this outbreak and prevent future outbreaks from occurring,” said Moss, who co-leads the Johns Hopkins measles tracking project.

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“When you go to urgent care, you pay a $75 copay, and they’re like, ‘it’s viral and there’s nothing we can do for you,’” Jespersen said. So she turned to ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot from OpenAI, and asked: “Should I go to the doctor or not?” The answer was no.

A few days later, she took a three-hour nap — an unusual occurrence for her, who described herself as “not a napper.” Sinus pressure, headaches, fatigue and a high fever followed. She finally went to urgent care, using ChatGPT, to help her decide when it was time to see a doctor. At the medical facility, she was tested for strep, COVID-19 and influenza. The test revealed she had influenza A, a type of flu virus.

Jespersen is far from the only one turning to ChatGPT to make health-related decisions. According to OpenAI, more than 40 million people ask ChatGPT a health-related question every day, with some 230 million asking a health-related question per week. From a business perspective, it did not come as a surprise to many that on Jan. 7, the company announced that over the coming weeks it would be rolling out ChatGPT Health.

In the announcement, the company stated that consumers will be able to upload their medical records and wellness apps to make the service more useful and customized. ChatGPT Health is meant “to support, not replace,” medical care, and it is not intended for “diagnosis or treatment,” the company said. Instead, it will help users navigate “everyday questions” and “understand patterns over time” to help people feel prepared and informed

This may sound familiar to those who recall the rollout of the health care information website WebMD, which also promised to empower and inform people about their bodies. It quickly became the most popular source of health information in the United States and paved a way for a new digital era in health information — giving people a chance to self-diagnose or symptoms check for a health problem — but also helped introduce terms like “cyberchondria,” in which a person engages in excessive online searching for health information, leading to increased anxiety, unfounded distress and misinterpretation of symptoms.

As ChatGPT Health enters the chat, so to speak, many are wondering if it will be a helpful tool in America’s broken health care system or if it will exacerbate long-standing problems about how the digital age is changing access to health information.

“I have often said that ChatGPT is similar to the WebMD Symptom Checker,” family physician Dr. Alexa Mieses Malchuk told Salon. “While ChatGPT is more interactive, neither resource is without pitfalls.”

A study published in NPJ Digital Medicine recently found that this technology, known as large language models, are built to prioritize being helpful over being accurate when it comes to medical information. Indeed, one major concern about ChatGPT Health is that it won’t provide accurate health information.

“It’s great that anyone can access information, but on the flipside, if you don’t have medical training, you don’t know how to sift through that information and figure out what’s important,” Malchuk said. “ChatGPT Health will integrate with certain personal health data and make recommendations based on codes and algorithms.”

However, Malchuk emphasized, it cannot replace “the experience of a medical professional” who is better equipped to understand “the nuance” of a person’s situation.

The stakes are lower when a person is trying to figure out if they have a cold or the flu. But when it comes to more serious health issues, like cancer, the consequences can be big. A 2023 study found that when ChatGPT was asked to generate treatment plans for various cancers, its plans contained numerous errors, including some “difficult even for experts to detect.”

More recently, the American Society of Clinical Oncology said that newer research has shown that ChatGPT’s answers to questions about symptoms, prevention and screening of colon cancer specifically were “highly accurate and reliable by a review panel of expert oncologists.” This suggests that LLMs could be useful in answering patients’ questions, but not in creating diagnoses or treatment plans.

Malchuk emphasized to Salon that prompts — the commands or requests sent to chatbots — matter, too.

“ChatGPT is also limited based on the prompts that you provide,” Malchuk said. “Again, without any medical knowledge, you might not be asking the right questions of ChatGPT.”

In 2013, researcher Thomas A. Fergus published a study in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, turning attention to the impact of having limitless health information online on anxiety. Specifically, Fergus suspected that searching for symptoms online had the potential to exacerbate health anxiety. The results of his 512 person study confirmed this. People with higher levels of “intolerance of uncertainty” were “especially likely” to experience health anxiety as a result of Internet searches.

Elizabeth Sadock, a clinical psychologist in Virginia, said that anxiety preys on uncertainty. But part of the process in overcoming anxiety, especially health anxiety, is sitting with the uncertainty. That can be difficult when people rely on a machine for constant reassurance.

“I think it is set up in a way that makes it very hard to resist, always available at any time of day, affirming, never tiring of questions,” Sadock told Salon. “And reassurance seeking is a way to feed that anxiety and keep us on the hook, always looking for more reassurance.”

ChatGPT, Sadock said, can “keep feeding that reassurance-seeking behavior.”

For her patients with health anxiety, some would use WebMD “excessively,” which was not healthy for their anxiety.

“And so, their homework would be to limit their use, as to not reinforce their anxiety,” she said. “And now, limiting ChatGPT can be part of the treatment plan as well, again, assuming it is interfering with their life and functioning.”

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Then there are concerns over security and privacy. Bradley Malin, an accenture professor of biomedical informatics at Vanderbilt University, told Salon he isn’t so much concerned about how secure the data is, as he believes OpenAI has made a good faith effort to secure data thus far, but what the consequences are — and for whom — in the event of a breach.

“I wouldn’t say it’s even a security issue, it’s the fact that it’s not regulated in the same way that a health care system would be regulated with respect to a medical record system,” Malin said. “It’s unclear to me how the protections that OpenAI is putting in place relate to what HIPAA actually requires.”

Malin said it’s positive that OpenAI won’t use medical records for training their LLMs, and that they’re separating the health information from other information. But for medical record systems, HIPAA requires specific security measures to be applied.

“It does make you question if a patient understands that their rights might actually change when they’re shifting from looking at their medical record in a secured environment and then you allow that data to flow to another application that’s outside the control of that organization,” Malin said. “As well as outside of the protections that HIPAA affords the patient.”

Dr. Neal Kumar, board-certified dermatologist, said ChatGPT Health is not about replacing doctors, but instead of giving people “another layer of support.” From a dermatologist’s perspective, ChatGPT Health can be helpful as an educational tool. It can help people clarify basic medical terminology.

“For example, ChatGPT can help educate patients about topics such as nutrition for hair health, or types of sunscreen before an appointment,” Kumar said. “ChatGPT is not a certified or FDA-approved medical device capable of providing medical diagnoses; accurate dermatologic evaluation still requires interpretation from a licensed clinician.”

When asked if ChatGPT Health will be the new WebMD, Kumar said “not quite.”

“WebMD provides curated, medically-reviewed content, whereas ChatGPT Health generates responses using AI language models, which can occasionally be inaccurate or misleading,” Kumar said.

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In New York City, residents are waking up to temperatures in the single digits, with wind chills making conditions feel even harsher. In Minneapolis, where ICE incidents continue to escalate, the regular temperatures that are usually below freezing, are currently sitting comfortably in the negatives, though they not hindering any protests or federal operations.

Major airports, including those in Dallas, Chicago and New York, have canceled or delayed hundreds of flights, leaving travelers scrambling and stranding some far from home. The storm is notable for its timing: it is hitting hard in mid‑January, when traffic is lighter than the holiday season, demonstrating that even routine winter travel can be thrown into chaos.

As of this posting, at least 22 states and Washington, D.C., have declared a state of emergency in anticipation of this storm including Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia.

Meteorologists warn that the mix of ice, heavy snow, and arctic air is unusually widespread. While extreme cold is not uncommon, the scale of simultaneous disruption across multiple states is rare and highlights how vulnerable transportation and energy systems remain.

“Part of the storm system is bringing heavy snow, while other parts will see strong winds and much colder temperatures as the front passes,” said Bob Oravec, a lead forecaster at the National Weather Service.

Forecasters also warned that the storm’s reach means people could be stuck at home for several days, urging residents to stock supplies and prepare for overlapping hazards.

For Americans on the ground, the storm has real consequences. Power outages in rural areas leave homes without heat for hours or even days. Snow-clogged roads slow emergency responders. Schools, businesses and public offices are forced to close, while those without flexible schedules are left to navigate treacherous commutes or canceled flights.

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Despite some comments by climate change deniers, scientists note that warming global temperatures do not eliminate winter storms, but rather, they can intensify them. Warmer air holds more moisture, fueling heavier snowfall, and combined with aging infrastructure, even predictable winter events can become crises.

As crews work to clear roads, restore power, and reopen airports, the storm is a reminder that preparation and not surprise is the only way to mitigate extreme weather’s human impact.

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According to AP News, the Trump administration is expanding this ban to include international and domestic organizations that advocate “gender ideology” as well as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. It will apply to other governments, multilateral institutions, and U.S.-based organizations as well.

The way the extension is designed could apply to nearly $50 billion of non-military foreign assistance. It includes a “flow down” restriction, which means that anyone who signs to accept the aid will have to ensure that their subgrantees are also compliant with the rule and its new extensions.

“So if there’s $50 billion of U.S. foreign assistance and humanitarian assistance is constrained, then partners within that system who are partners to those who sign would also be constrained,” Beth Schlachter, senior director of U.S. external relations at MSI Reproductive Choices, a global family planning organization that works in nearly 40 countries, explained to Salon. “It’s a massive, massive escalation.”

When President Donald Trump first took office in 2017, one of the very first executive orders was reinstating the global gag rule. Later in his presidency, the Trump administration expanded the rule to apply to all U.S. global health assistance. The ripple effects were greatly felt internationally. Health clinics for teenagers in Ethiopia, once supported by U.S. funding, shut down. An effort to include HIV testing in family planning in Kenya fell apart.

As detailed by the Guttmacher Institue last year, the first Trump administration’s global gag rule expansions had “devastating” impacts. It decreased access to abortion and contraceptive care globally. It also created a “chilling” effect among clinicians who were scared to share family-planning resources due to a fear of it affecting funding — even in countries with progressive policies on abortion. In 2021, the Biden administration rescinded the rule, but it was reinstated during Trump’s second term.

As for how it will work being applied to organizations that advocate “gender ideology” and DEI, Schlachter said there’s “no precedent.”

“There are vulnerabilities all over where the U.S. holds the purse and has people by the neck,” Schlachter said. “Some are willing participants, and others are going to be compelled because of this envelope of funding, or they don’t want to get in the crosshairs with tariffs.”

Guttmacher Institute estimates that 50 million women and girls have already been denied contraceptive care in low and middle-income countries globally. The defunding of USAID last year, is estimated to lead to 14 million additional deaths worldwide by 2030.

“This new radical policy threatens to aggravate the cumulative harms of earlier administration actions, undermining decades of bipartisan investment in global health and gender equality, and stripping resources from the world’s most vulnerable populations, including LGBTQ+ communities around the world,” Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of Federal Policy at the Guttmacher Institute, said in a statement. “This global gag rule is about control and using foreign aid to impose a cruel anti-human rights ideology on the world.”

Indeed, experts say this is what the main mission is — to take the administration’s extreme agenda and spread it internationally. International groups have blasted the decision, with Amnesty International saying this expansion is “an assault on human rights. By targeting organizations that support DEI initiatives and recognize gender diversity, the Trump administration is deliberately deepening inequality and putting the lives of millions around the world at risk.”

“Not satisfied with forcing a dangerous and unpopular agenda on people here in the U.S., the Trump administration is exporting its attacks on health and rights abroad,” Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said in a statement. “In doing so, they’re expanding on their deadly anti-abortion playbook in an unprecedented weaponization of foreign aid that threatens the health and lives of countless women, girls, young people and LGBTQI+ people in communities around the world.”

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“It’s caused a great amount of uncertainty,” Lilienthal told Salon in a phone interview. “It has definitely upped the anxiety levels around here, the stress levels … It’s been a real burden on pretty much everything right now.”

During the 43-day long government shutdown, Democrats kept pushing to include an extension of the Obamacare subsidies in a spending package to reopen the government. However, eight Democrats sided with Republicans to end the record-breaking shutdown. President Donald Trump signed the spending bill into law without the health care measures, leaving potentially millions to go without health care in 2026 or face astronomical costs. An estimated 24.3 million Americans are insured through ACA plans and an estimated 92 percent receive some form of subsidy, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The ACA subsidies will end in December. 31, 2025, though some lawmakers are looking for solutions.

Lilienthal isn’t alone in his anxiety, and it’s not just the loss of ACA subsidies if nothing changes. This week, a new West Health-Gallup study found that Americans are going into 2026 more anxious about health care costs than in previous years. The survey, which has been conducted annually since 2021, was based on roughly 20,000 people across the country who were surveyed between June and August of this year, before the government shutdown. They were asked 27 questions about their health care experiences. Almost 50 percent of adults surveyed said they were worried they wouldn’t be able to afford health care in 2026. In the survey, one in five adults said that someone in their household was unable to afford a prescription in the past three months. An estimated 30 percent of those surveyed said a household member had skipped medical treatment due to cost being a barrier.

Alaina Shearer, an owner of a boutique ad agency called Good Now, told Salon that while she won’t be directly affected by ACA subsidies as she doesn’t receive them, she is considering going without health care for the first time in her adult life. Currently, the plan she is on for a family of four will increase from $1,295 a month to $1,695 in 2026 — but the coverage they have is not great. In fact, the deductible is $20,000, which means they have to pay for prescriptions and every medical screening. She estimates that they pay an average of $400 a month for copays and prescriptions. The “better” plan she is considering for next year, with a $7,000 deductible, is $2,300 each month.

“I have been exploring, asking my local son’s doctor, like, what would it be if we just come in on a cash basis?” she said. “But if an emergency happens, or one of us gets diagnosed with cancer or something, it’s terrifying to think about what would happen.”

Shearer has owned her business since 2009. Back then, she paid $350 for her family’s health insurance.

“It’s hard not to think of myself as failing my family and my kids,” Shearer said. “We’ve never gone without health insurance, the thought of that alone just makes me feel like I’m failing my family somehow — but then I remind myself, this is bigger than us.”

The United States is the only high-income country that doesn’t have universal health care. While high-income countries tend to spend more per person on health care than lower-income countries, the U.S. spends far more per person on health care. And yet, it has the lowest life expectancy among large, wealthy countries.

Munira Z. Gunja, a senior researcher in the Commonwealth Fund’s Promoting International Learning and Exchange program, told Salon in a phone interview that health care is so expensive in the United States for a variety of reasons.

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“The price of services in hospitals can be really, really high,” she said. “For insurance companies, there’s a whole spectrum of services where other people will profit, and the consumer may not see better health outcomes.”

In 2023, an estimated 8 percent of Americans lacked health insurance. Deborah Kevin, a 62-year-old based in Baltimore, Maryland, and a small business owner of Highlander Press, told Salon that going without health care at her age isn’t really optional — but she’s not sure how she’s going to afford next year’s increase. Currently, she pays $365 per month for health insurance through Blue Cross/Blue Shield for her and her husband. It comes with a $6,100 annual deductible. Without ACA subsidies, her premium will jump to nearly $1,600 a month in 2026.

“This increase makes us question what kind of care we’ll actually be able to afford,” Kevin said. “Do we downgrade our coverage and risk higher out-of-pocket expenses if something goes wrong? Do we absorb the cost and slash other areas of our budget?”

Figuring out how to absorb these costs has led to “more than a few sleepless nights,” she said.

“There’s a quiet kind of stress that comes with running your own company: you carry the weight, alone, of every decision — how to care for your clients, your team, your family and yourself,” Kevin said. “This health insurance increase makes that weight even heavier.”

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Kennedy’s team, including Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and former TV host Dr. Mehmet Oz, moved toward language that reframes alcohol not strictly as a health hazard, but as something adults might reasonably incorporate into their lifestyles.

Supporters argue this reflects an overdue reset in federal nutrition policy, one that privileges nuance over blanket prohibition and embraces individual responsibility.

But not everyone agrees. Public health researchers have pushed back, pointing to decades of evidence linking even moderate drinking to cancer, liver disease and a host of chronic conditions. A recent analysis underscores how previous guidelines have struggled to balance nuance with clarity, often leaving consumers confused about what “moderate” really means.

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International health bodies, like a British analysis of global alcohol consumption data, show that nations taking stricter stances have seen measurable public‑health gains, complicating the idea that more permissive guidance is inherently “liberating.”

According to HHS, the broader nutrition policy reset aims to reflect emerging science and give Americans more flexible, personalized recommendations. Yet the resulting ambiguity risks reinforcing the very problem the guidelines purport to solve: public distrust of expert guidance.

In a media environment where science itself is politicized, RFK Jr.’s framing of alcohol consumption, part health advice and part personal‑freedom manifesto, underscores how even routine policy announcements can become cultural battlegrounds. Whether that enhances public health, erodes it or simply muddles the conversation further remains an open question.

The post RFK Jr. redefines “moderate drinking” in federal guidelines appeared first on Salon.com.

These moments of return do not happen by chance. They happen because public policy finally aligns with evidence and because communities were able to use tools we already know save lives. Policymakers expanded access to medications for opioid use disorder, protected telehealth for addiction treatment and widened community access to naloxone. People are home for the holidays because life-saving systems were finally allowed to fully function.

Whether this progress continues depends on the choices we make now. As we head into 2026, the foundational policies that saved lives this year could disappear before the next holiday season.

Lifesaving tools that have driven the decline remain vulnerable. Medications for opioid use disorder — especially buprenorphine and methadone — cut the risk of death by more than half. Yet for years, federal rules and insurance barriers have kept these treatments out of reach. Even now, many patients face bureaucratic paperwork hurdles, such as prior authorization requirements, which interrupt care and separate patients from necessary prescriptions. States have worked to close these gaps by expanding mobile treatment programs and embedding addiction treatment into primary care, specifically in Texas and Massachusetts.

These changes increased the odds of survival, but the initiatives remain under-resourced and at-risk. In recent years, telehealth has become one of the most powerful drivers of improved access. Research shows that patients who begin treatment virtually stay in recovery at similar or higher rates than those who start in person. While skeptics remain, the data confirm that telehealth provides quality care without increasing overdose risk. This is especially important to rural counties and households without reliable transportation, where telehealth means the difference between care instead of a crisis. But in 2026, those flexibilities will vanish unless Congress acts.

Additional changes to insurance coverage expose how quickly people can lose access and be pushed out of treatment. Medicaid covers nearly half of non-elderly adults with opioid use disorder, paying for the critical treatment services that get people to recovery. But this backbone is weakening. During the unwinding of pandemic protections, more than 23 million people have lost Medicaid coverage, which is often due to paperwork errors rather than changes in eligibility. This number is estimated to increase significantly following the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill, which according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), will slash Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) spending by nearly $1 trillion over a decade and eliminate over 10 million people from the programs. Similarly, the CBO warns that about 1.5 million Americans will be uninsured in 2026 if Congress delays extending the ACA enhanced tax credits.

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Congress has the power to address these lapsing policies in 2026 and needs to act — just as it did with the bipartisan reauthorization of the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act, which promises to continue federal funding for core recovery programs and to address overdose. 

But maintaining the status quo is not enough to resolve the fracture points where people still fall out of care. In 2026, Congress should pass legislation to ensure that Americans who are most vulnerable to fatal overdose, such as those entering and leaving jail and prison, receive evidence-based, lifesaving treatment. Congress can grow the treatment workforce by funding and expanding peer recovery support workers. These proposals follow the same evidence that drove the decline in 2025.

The drop in overdose deaths this year is real. It reflects years of work by clinicians, community groups, families and bipartisan lawmakers who chose data over dogma. But a decline does not equal victory. It equals a narrow window of opportunity. The difference between momentum and reversal now runs through the legislative decisions that will shape 2026. 

Just like this holiday season, families will gather again next December. Some seats will be filled because of the policies that worked in 2025. Others will stand empty if those policies unravel in 2026. The country already knows which choices save lives. What remains unclear is whether it will keep making them.

The post The overdose crisis is turning around appeared first on Salon.com.

Kennedy, 71, has no medical or government background, but since his appointment in February, he has undertaken massive changes to the nation’s many agencies tasked with keeping people alive and healthy. That includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which monitors for disease outbreaks, and the Food and Drug Administration, which approves new medications and treatments.

Last week, at Kennedy’s behest, the CDC removed the statement “vaccines do not cause autism” from its vaccine safety page, tweaking it with “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” Apparently, Kennedy has never heard of the burden of proof or the extreme difficulty in proving a negative. This is no minor revision — it not only broke one of many promises Kennedy made to Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., the deciding vote in Kennedy’s confirmation, but it drew widespread outcry from doctors, scientists and other public health experts. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told KFF Health News that Kennedy and his “nihilistic Dark Age compatriots have transformed the CDC into an organ of anti-vaccine propaganda.”

This is only one of dozens of ways in which Kennedy has crusaded against standards in science and health. Kennedy has fired thousands of employees across the board (including mere weeks after a mass shooting at CDC headquarters), gutted billions in research funds, attacked medications from antidepressants to acetaminophen (Tylenol), and dismantled and recast vaccine advisory bodies with “noted vaccine skeptics and conspiracy theorists,” as PBS reported. Kennedy has long railed against these institutions because, he says, they have been co-opted by industry and are dedicated to extracting profit from public health instead of fortifying it.

There’s no denying Americans’ health is dismal, and a big part of that is major conflicts of interest between pharmaceutical giants, corporate agriculture and the departments that regulate them. Kennedy is absolutely right that this system needs reform — but his prescriptions aren’t well-informed by evidence and seem poised to exacerbate the problem.

Still, Kennedy is beloved by many, and not just on the right. When he suspended his bid for president in 2024 and endorsed then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, many saw it as a perk that the current president would let him “go wild on health,” as Trump put it. And that’s just what he has done.

Yet so much of the media coverage around Kennedy, especially lately, has focused more on his personality and lurid life history rather than the chaos and destruction he has sown. The Atlantic graced their latest cover with Kennedy, complete with a glamour shoot, fawning at the camera with a rosary in hand like a choir boy. The accompanying headline, “The most powerful man in science,” is more than a little misleading. Saying he’s the “most powerful” is a little like saying the fastest driver in NASCAR is a nuclear bomb. What are we even comparing here? Kennedy isn’t in science in the literal sense and certainly not from any sort of merit. He’s never run a clinical trial, treated a patient or published academic research. He landed his position because the current president returns favors like a Mafia boss and is enamored with the idea of a Kennedy being in his cabinet, not to mention the disdain Trump has for public health, as demonstrated during the botched reponse to COVID-19 in 2020.

To his credit, author Michael Scherer professes good intentions in featuring Kennedy in such an adulatory light: to help bridge some of the political division plaguing our country. Maybe if we can step inside Kennedy’s mind, we can find some middle ground and actually work toward a healthier America.

It’s a lofty goal, but it might not be very relevant, just like the absurd details of Kennedy’s melodramatic history. Even Scherer finds it hard not to profile the secretary without at least glancing at his many bizarre escapades, from dumping a dead bear in Central Park to allegedly eating barbecued dog, to hand-waving away sexual assault allegations with the explanation “I am not a church boy.” The article paints Kennedy’s long struggles with addiction and infidelity leading to his current position of influence as a sort of Dantesque excursion, “back from hell, still fighting to fulfill his birthright.”

It’s a fascinating profile, but we really don’t need any of these details any more than we need New York Magazine reporter Olivia Nuzzi gushing about her inappropriate personal relationship with Kennedy. Again, flush with cosmopolitan snapshots, the recent New York Times profile of Nuzzi glosses over some severe problems.

“Nuzzi did not want to discuss Kennedy’s tenure as secretary of health and human services,” Jacob Bernstein reports in the Times profile, while Nuzzi says, “I don’t have any interest in offering punditry.”

That might be fine if people’s lives weren’t at stake. There are multiple public health crises stacked on top of each other, from overdose deaths to declines in life expectancy to heart disease and dementia to unnecessary deaths from abortion bans to still circulating COVID and ongoing measles outbreaks. It’s hard to argue Kennedy is doing much to address any of this when he’s busy firing people, dousing scientific research and picking fights over his convictions that mainstream medicine is wrong about nearly everything.

His credibility is worsened by numerous conflicts of interest, including receiving money from anti-vaccine organizations that he has worked for while positioning himself to profit from anti-vaccine lawsuits. Since becoming health secretary, Kennedy has distanced himself from these ventures, but there’s more at stake.

“His entire political project — his campaign, his hiring by Trump, his role at HHS — is entwined with his ability to prove that scientists were deceiving the public about vaccines. He would lose a lot if he changed his mind,” Scherer writes.

In contrast, conflicts of interest among federal vaccine advisers are at historic lows and have been for years, according to research published in August in JAMA. “Secretary Kennedy is right that conflict of interest is an important issue, but he is wrong that it is present at substantial levels on HHS vaccine advisory committees,” study co-author Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and former FDA associate commissioner, said in a press release.

“‘Trusting the experts’ is not a feature of science,” Kennedy says in The Atlantic story. “It’s not a feature of democracy. It’s a feature of totalitarianism and religion.”

Rich words given the overt totalitarianism happening under Trump’s watch. Kennedy is conveniently ignoring the real mass surveillance in this country, and it’s not vaccines. Every major social media platform is owned by the richest people in history, who suck up so much data on you that they can weaponize it to sway elections and dull us with doomscrolling. Flock automatic license plate readers are being used to monitor protests and enable ICE raids. American citizens are now regularly detained by homeland security adviser Stephen Miller’s masked police force, while migrants are whisked away to dungeon-like prisons in El Salvador. Yeah, the Department of Homeland Security is threatening anyone who dares film them snatching people, but “trusting the experts” is pure Stalinism. Kennedy is no fool — he knows that his efforts are more antithetical to democracy than he lets on.

And we knew all of Kennedy’s corruption long before he was appointed. But if we needed any reminder, we only need to look at his family relationships. Last week, Tatiana Schlossberg, granddaughter of former President John F. Kennedy, published a moving essay in The New Yorker detailing her battle with a terminal form of leukemia. It reads almost like an obituary, detailing the suffering and grief she’s experienced as she pushes through treatment she knows will do little to save her life. But she also took space to express the horror she’s felt witnessing her cousin’s ascent to power:

Bobby is a known skeptic of vaccines, and I was especially concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get mine again, leaving me to spend the rest of my life immunocompromised, along with millions of cancer survivors, small children, and the elderly. Bobby has said, “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” Bobby probably doesn’t remember the millions of people who were paralyzed or killed by polio before the vaccine was available. My dad, who grew up in New York City in the nineteen-forties and fifties, does remember. Recently, I asked him what it was like when he got the vaccine. He said that it felt like freedom.

…

I watched as Bobby cut nearly a half billion dollars for research into mRNA vaccines, technology that could be used against certain cancers; slashed billions in funding from the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest sponsor of medical research; and threatened to oust the panel of medical experts charged with recommending preventive cancer screenings. Hundreds of N.I.H. grants and clinical trials were cancelled, affecting thousands of patients.

Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump shocked and dismayed his family, but it’s really not all that surprising that the two are bedfellows. Kennedy isn’t the reality TV showman Trump is, but they share many of the same apparent narcissistic tendencies. Consider the performative flourish and hubris it requires for Kennedy to have announced in April that the nation’s top health agency would find the cause of autism in mere months, then blaming it on Tylenol in September, despite there being no evidence for his claim. A month later, Kennedy backtracked on these remarks, saying “The causative association between Tylenol given in pregnancy … is not sufficient to say it definitely caused autism, but it is very suggestive.”

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You really don’t need to sympathize with Kennedy’s tragic backstory or his apparent charm to certain political correspondents to understand why he approaches public health with the gravitas of a rabid raccoon. The Atlantic story and other accounts of Kennedy make it clear he views himself as the lone hero of a great battle, a Beowulf intending to slay a dragon of dogma and lies. Kennedy has indeed faced a lot of opposition in life, perhaps now more than ever. But he’s more of a Don Quixote tilting at windmills because his solutions amount to the same level of self-delusion.

Take, for example, Kennedy’s staunch rejection of germ theory in favor of “miasma theory.” In his 2021 book, “The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy defines this as “preventing disease by fortifying the immune system through nutrition and by reducing exposures to environmental toxins and stresses.” He posits that “Miasmists argue that malnutrition and inadequate access to clean water are the ultimate stressors that make infectious diseases lethal in impoverished locales. When a starving African child succumbs to measles, the miasmist attributes the death to malnutrition; germ theory proponents (a.k.a. virologists) blame the virus. The miasmist approach to public health is to boost individual immune response.”

There’s some truth to this, but the overarching emphasis on miasma theory fundamentally ignores how the immune system works. It’s not a zero-sum game. Katherine Wu explained in a recent Atlantic piece: “The reality is that both environment and pathogens often influence the outcome of disease, and both should be addressed.”

When you wipe away all the chaos and arguments over scientific data, or the lack of it — and do your best to ignore the salacious nature of Kennedy’s persona — the true mission behind Making America Healthy Again becomes apparent. It’s not about whether vaccines really work; it’s whether the government should have any say in an individual’s health at all. What that translates to, intentionally or not, is you’re on your own now, bub. Health insurance, guidance, research — you don’t need that. Instead, there is an overwhelming emphasis on the individual. Eat better, exercise and take some supplements and you won’t even need a shot or a doctor. Anyone who can’t follow this advice is doomed to just die, I guess.

There are sometimes valid reasons to distrust experts. There were numerous institutional failures during the COVID pandemic and the tendrils of capitalism embedded in public health have given people good cause for skepticism. But just because a medicine or vaccine can be profitable does not mean it’s useless. Just because some advice was unhelpful or counterproductive during a global pandemic — school closures being an oft-cited example — does not mean that a novel virus is safe to breathe in.

But instead of strengthening the structures at HHS that work and encouraging the public to trust them, Kennedy has given people even less reason to trust the government on these issues. It’s becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the “public” in public health is erased, ignoring the deeply rooted fact that an individual’s health cannot and never will be isolated from everyone else. That’s exactly why we train people to deeply study these problems and trust their judgment based on data that is transparent and peer-reviewed. We need more of that, not less. The lone warrior battling against insurmountable foes makes for a nice fairy tale, but it does not translate to protecting a nation’s health.

The post RFK Jr.’s individualist rhetoric hides a deeper public health threat appeared first on Salon.com.

In response to this, many states are abandoning federal leadership and forging their own path. Less than a week after an advisory committee at the CDC changed a recommendation on when infants should receive the hepatitis B vaccine, California announced it was launching the Public Health Network Innovation Exchange. The regional alliance, state officials said, would be led by former CDC health officials. In a media release, the state elaborated that PHNIX would serve as a counterpoint to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Trump administration’s anti-science public health policies. It would focus on “innovation,” “developing advanced technology,” and “funding frameworks” for public health preparedness and response.

“Dramatic and unfounded changes in federal policy, funding, and scientific practice have created uncertainty and instability in public health and health care,” Dr. Erica Pan, director at California Department of Public Health, said in a statement.

Other states are also going somewhat rogue in the wake of the Trump administration’s dismantling of public health care and the CDC. As previously reported for Salon, doctors across the country are losing faith in the CDC as the “voice of reason” in public health. In September, California, Oregon and Washington formed a West Coast Health Alliance to provide unified health information, of which the latest initiative builds upon. In the Northeast, seven states, including New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, came together to form the Northeast Public Health Collaborative to make its own vaccine recommendations.

More recently, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed legislation to expand an executive order empowering the state’s Department of Public Health to offer transparent and science-based vaccine guidelines through its own Immunization Advisory Committee. The formation of so-called micro health alliances marks a new and uncharted chapter in public health, leaving open-ended questions about what this means for the future of public health.

“The trend of these multi-state public health alliances that are mostly framed in opposition to the federal government, in combination with declining resources, staffing and support for public health from the federal government itself, indicate the future of public health in the U.S. looks more fractured and challenging than ever,” Josh Michaud, the associate director of global health and public health policy at KFF, told Salon.

When asked if there’s anything to be gained by forming these micro-alliances, Michaud said states can “benefit from coordination of public health recommendations, regulations, information and practices,” especially when they feel that the federal government is no longer a trustworthy source of information and effective partner. He gave an example: states can guarantee that vaccine recommendations across states are in alignment.

“In the event of a public health emergency, having these connections already forged can speed detection, improve data-sharing and response, and can allow states to share resources and know-how without having to count solely on federal support,” Michaud said, adding that they can also be a display of “political unity” for public health issues. It can also be symbolic and a way for states to “publicly push back against federal guidance that they feel is no longer rooted in the best science and evidence.”

The U.S. briefly saw this during the COVID-19 pandemic under the first Trump administration when Western states formed a coalition to share supplies in response to hoarding at the federal level. Notably, Republican states also took similar actions to oppose pandemic policies led by the Biden administration. But under Trump’s second term, micro-health alliances have so far only included Democratic-led states. Michaud said this fracturing of public health will make “a unified response to a national public health emergency more challenging.”

“And it will leave the public more confused than ever because they will likely have multiple voices to look to for guidance and support who may offer conflicting messages and advice,” he said.

Indeed, while the formation of these alliances seems to be almost a short-term solution, they speak to a larger trend in public health in America: politicization.

“Having some states be at odds with the federal government can introduce delays and challenges when it comes time for coordinated and timely responses to national public health issues or a major emergency,” Michaud said. “It risks further politicizing and undermining public health to have multiple actors providing different, often conflicting messages.”

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Abby Tighe, executive director for the National Public Health Coalition, who was previously terminated in February, agreed that if the U.S. continues on this path of regional health alliances, it will end up with a “fragmented” public health system.

“That, frankly, leaves a lot of people out,” Tighe said. “And some of our most vulnerable populations out.”

Tighe said this is what concerns her the most. That’s not to say there is no need for them, though.

“The federal government is no longer offering that kind of reliable structure for public health,” Tighe said. “But what this means is that the states that have the money or the political will to go into these agreements within the region, it means that those are the only people who get access to quality public health.”

Epidemiologists can move to areas that can hire them and pay their salary to do the work they care about, Tighe said, but then those regions are only going to focus on the people that they serve.

Both Tighe and Michaud warned that there are limits on what these alliances can do as well, which raises bigger questions around public health agencies in the United States.

“There are limits to state powers when it comes to public health, so alliances can’t replace the role of the federal government,” Michaud said. “In addition, each state is very much independent of other states when it comes to deciding policy and must work within its own political and regulatory set of rules, so true coordination across states can only go so far as well.”

Indeed, Tighe emphasized that the CDC, for example, is not a “regulatory body,” but it makes recommendations. However, in the chaos of public health being politicized, it’s become a scapegoat for policies that some don’t like. She gave an example with COVID-19.

“CDC at no point put out a vaccine mandate that is something that policymakers decided to do,” Tighe said, adding that this lack of understanding about the CDC’s role ends up framing it as a “political pawn,” which ultimately “degrades science.”

As people reimagine U.S. public health in the future, especially beyond the Trump administration, Tighe said the country might benefit from a system that is “insulated from partisanship.”

“I deeply believe that public health is political and we rely on policymakers to prioritize it, but it is not partisan,” Tighe said. “I think if you talk to people about what public health does, and what the importance of it is, and even health care is a piece of this as well, it’s not partisan to want to live in a safe place, to not want your family members to die of a disease, and to want safe and healthy and clean food.”

As far as how much these micro-alliances will take on, it remains unknown.

“I think these alliances are still mostly in pilot stages,” Michaud said. “Certainly there could be more ‘real-world impact’ to come, and how much responsibility these alliances take on may depend partially on future actions, or inaction, from the federal government.”

The post As federal public health collapses under Trump, states are improvising appeared first on Salon.com.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported dozens of confirmed cases in several states this month, including clusters linked to unvaccinated communities. Public health experts say that while measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. two decades ago, gaps in vaccination coverage have allowed the virus to resurface.

Before becoming the head of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has been a longtime vaccine skeptic and served as the head of Children’s Health Defense. That organization has repeatedly questioned the safety and necessity of childhood immunizations, including the MMR vaccine.

The debate has reignited discussions about vaccination policies in schools and public spaces. One idea is to match the schedule found within the Denmark school and health system. That country maintains high vaccination compliance through its childhood vaccine schedule, helping the country keep measles nearly eliminated.

However, Danish doctors question its direct correlation as the medical needs of children in both countries don’t entirely line up. But some public health officials in the U.S. point to such models as examples of how consistent messaging and access can prevent outbreaks.

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In response to rising case numbers, some states are tightening school-entry vaccine requirements and launching outreach campaigns. CBS News reported that Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock called Kennedy a “hazard to public health,” reflecting broader concern in political circles.

Experts warn that the outbreak could expand if vaccination rates continue to lag. “Children should be getting all the vaccines recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics,” said Dr. Swathi Mannava Gowtham, a Pennsylvania pediatric infectious diseases physician.

“One of the triumphs of 20th century medicine is that vaccines have significantly reduced infant and childhood mortality, along with other public health measures, and immunization is one of the strongest public health measures we have,” Dr. Gowtham said. “My worry is that when we have pockets of nonvaccination or undervaccination we’re going to see a rise in cases in which each incidence, each complication was preventable. And that to me is tragic,”

The post Outbreaks expose gaps in US vaccination coverage appeared first on Salon.com.

“We can’t trust them anymore since ACIP was gutted of vaccine experts and replaced with people with little or no knowledge or experience with vaccine science, immunology or public health,” Blumberg told Salon. “It’s a challenging time with prominent voices fabricating distortions about vaccines.”

Since 1991, ACIP has recommended a hepatitis B vaccine for all infants. The recommendation has led to a 99% decrease in severe infections between 1990 and 2019. But with the recent change, the organization now recommends administering the first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine 30 days after birth to all children whose mothers have tested negative for the disease, rather than administering it within the first 24 hours of life. The committee that voted in favor of the delay is composed of members hand-picked by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a long-time opponent of vaccines who fired all of the panel’s former members over the summer.

“I’m sorry to see this recommendation go forward; there is no evidence to support this change,” Blumberg said. “The hepatitis B vaccine is safe. We have been using it for decades, and there are no new safety concerns.”

The universal infant hepatitis B vaccine program has been “extraordinarily successful,” he added. “It’s foolish to step back from it.”

Blumberg’s concerns have been widely echoed throughout the medical and public health community. After the vote, public health officials gathered for a press conference. Chrissie Juliano, executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition, emphasized that ACIP policy recommendations must be affirmed by the CDC Director. In response, they are calling on the CDC’s acting director Jim O’Neill to reject the recommendation.

“The science hasn’t changed — the people on the committee interpreting it has,” Juliano said. “All of our best studies and decades of experience point to continuing to vaccinate all newborns to protect them against hep B.”

Juliano also emphasized that pediatricians, parents, public health experts, and health insurance companies “still have a great deal of decision-making power” despite ACIP’s recommendation.

Hepatitis B is a viral infection that attacks the liver and can lead to both acute and chronic illness. It can cause cirrhosis, a chronic liver condition, liver failure, liver cancer, and in severe cases, death. Infections can be asymptomatic for years.

The virus is transmitted through bodily fluids, such as vaginal fluids and blood. The CDC estimates 640,000 adults have a chronic infection, but about half of them do not know they are infected and contagious. While pregnant people are routinely tested during the first trimester in the U.S., even if the mother is negative, the newborn can come into contact with others who might be infected, as the virus can live on surfaces for up to a week. In the 1980s, doctors only vaccinated high-risk individuals, and they did not see a significant decline in cases.

Dr. Lisa Costello, a pediatrician and associate professor of general pediatrics at the West Virginia University School of Medicine, who also cares for newborns, said the birth dose is very important.

“It provides vital protection at delivery and in the days and weeks after birth, when infants may be exposed to caregivers with unrecognized infection,” Costello said. “In the state in which I live and work, West Virginia, we have some of the highest cases of chronic hepatitis B in the country, and the majority of those cases are among those who are unvaccinated.”

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After completing the full hepatitis B vaccination series, 98 percent of healthy infants will have long-term immunity, Costello said.

“By eliminating or delaying the birth dose, we’re placing infants at preventable risk,” Costello said. “Without timely immunizations, some children will become infected, and unfortunately, some will die.”

Blumberg agreed.

“Yes, certainly this will lead to more infants being infected with hepatitis B, more chronically infected children, and more dying as a consequence,” Blumberg said. “Models suggest that this will result in an additional 1,400 infants infected every year in the US, and an additional 480 deaths due to these infections.”

Vaccines are usually covered by health insurance. For uninsured children, the CDC’s Vaccines for Children (VFC) program provides vaccines at no cost to eligible children through providers enrolled in the program. L. J. Tan, chief policy and partnerships officer at Immunize.org, told Salon that the VFC will still cover the hepatitis B vaccine despite the new recommendation. Private insurance plans said they will continue to cover the birth dose of hepatitis B vaccines for now.

Dr. Manisha Juthani, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Public Health and an infectious diseases physician, said that the recommendation does not “inhibit” abilities for states to order the vaccine, or the ability of pediatricians to administer it and for insurance companies to cover it right now. But it does create “a lot of confusion on the part of parents.”

Juthani gave an example. Since false statements have been made about vaccines and autism, she is hearing anecdotally that many parents of children with autism are starting to “question and wonder” if they made the right decision to vaccinate their children.

“This type of confusion ends up changing the way people behave,” Juthani said.

Dr. Michelle Taylor, Commissioner of the Baltimore City Health Department, said this past weekend she encountered firsthand the confusion parents are experiencing when a pregnant woman approached her recently with questions about vaccine safety.

“She said, ‘listen, I want the ability to ask questions and receive information without judgment,’” Taylor said. “And I told her, ‘I appreciate you telling me that, I’m going to share it with every single person that I can, and I’m so glad that you came to me to talk to me about what it is that you’re hearing, and what’s true and what’s not true.’”

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In 1954, at the age of 16, my dad was living with my grandfather in the Bronx when he was diagnosed with Hansen’s Disease, the preferred designation for leprosy. He was sent to Carville where he stayed under federal quarantine for nine years, until he was cured and discharged in 1963. Fifty-three years later, he was going back for the first time.

For my dad, our journey to Carville was a bittersweet homecoming. For me, it was both research trip and pilgrimage. I’d recently started writing my novel, “King of the Armadillos,” inspired by his experience, and he was helping me access material from the archives of the National Hansen’s Disease Museum. Located on the grounds of the former institution, which is now partially occupied by the National Guard, the museum invited my dad to record his oral history, so we decided to go.

My husband stopped the car in front of a set of high, iron gates. A guard in military uniform directed us past a white plantation house with sweeping balconies and Corinthian columns, through an avenue of live oaks, old and gnarled, and draped with Spanish moss, to the infirmary. It had been converted into military conference accommodation where we were staying.

Founded in 1894 on the grounds of an abandoned sugar plantation, the 330 acres of the institution were well-manicured with neatly mown lawns, flowering bushes, ornate gardens, a lake, a golf course, and sprawling fields amid the Victorian-style dorms, covered walkways, and numerous amenities that made Carville look more like a prep school than a leprosarium. But just as it had been when my dad was there, all that beauty was surrounded by a barbed wire fence.

The post My father’s bittersweet homecoming: A family visit to the institution that treated him for leprosy appeared first on Salon.com.

“But I was doing good work, wasn’t I? Even Aaron said I had a good outline.” My voice went up an octave, squeaky in its terror.

The showrunner didn’t respond to me at first. Then, finally, he spoke. “You can take your stuff out of this office tonight. You can use my parking space if you want.”

His eyes weren’t even angry, just unemotional. My boss went back to his managerial duties. Perhaps he was going to look over an edit of Episode 108. Perhaps he was going to write the new season’s arc. I didn’t know. But my firing was just a quick part of his day, a checklist to finish before he moved on to other work. I took my “Empire Strikes Back” poster and some sundry supplies out of the office. My days as a professional screenwriter were done.

Driving home, my belongings in the backseat, I talked to myself. “There’s been tons of famous people who were fired, right?” I repeated, a desperate mantra. “Francis Ford Coppola. Didn’t he get fired from ‘The Godfather’? Or was it ‘Apocalypse Now’? Hmm. Spielberg. He got fired, too. What was his movie? ‘Jaws’? Can’t remember, but he definitely got fired from something.”

If somebody was watching me on the 405 Freeway, they would have seen a lone driver, sweating obscenely, mumbling to himself like a madman. People do indeed get fired in Hollywood every day; it’s not some world-altering event. But for me, on a high from my first television writing job, being fired so quickly plummeted me flat on my ass. Already the owner of an anxious and depressed nervous system, I was truly and devastatingly rocked. A wave of negative wouldn’t stop ricocheting in my head. “You’re a failure. You never had any talent in the first place. You didn’t deserve it. This is proof.”

A normal person might have been able to brush off the loss. But I had inherited my father’s depressed DNA, and like him, I couldn’t recover.

* * * 

The next day, I called my manager Paul, a kindly man in his late fifties, with frizzy hair and a gregarious manner. We met at a writing convention in Burbank a few years back. He liked a couple of my movie pitches and we developed a friendship, and from there, a working relationship.

“I need to talk to you, it’s important. Can we get together?” My voice on the phone was anxious.

He quickly agreed. My office belongings still packed up in my car, I drove to Canter’s Deli on Fairfax. Paul and I sat across from each other, a bowl of matzo ball soup in front of each of us.

“I got fired yesterday.”

“I’m sorry, Kuang.” He looked at me kindly. “I could tell by the sound of your voice.”

“Thanks for being here.” I looked down at my matzo ball soup. It looked like a beached whale.

“It’s fine, buddy. This happens all the time. You write a new script, we get back right at it,” he said.

After that, we ate our food in mostly silence. As we left the deli, Paul handed me a ticket with a clown face on it. “What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s a stand-up comedy class. Comp ticket. I forgot to give it to you last time we met.”

“Um. Sure.” I shoved the ticket into my pocket, my shoulders slumped. Paul gave some more encouraging words about getting back to writing and a hug, and we parted ways.

The next morning, a dull dread enveloped me. I listened to a voicemail from my mother. “Kuang. Your father wants to talk to you. Can you call us back?” Talking to my Baba was the last thing I wanted to do. But I didn’t have a job to go to, and after wallowing in my own sweat for what seemed like hours, I pulled Paul’s crumbled comedy class ticket out of my jacket pocket.

I drove over to downtown Los Angeles’ Garment District, a neighborhood that wasn’t unsafe per se, but one I’d never visit if I didn’t have to. I looked up at my destination: a building with a bizarre extra-large clown head hung over its awning, with a sign, The Clown Palace, written in giant Comic Sans. My thoughts went into overdrive. This class, a gift from Paul, was supposed to just be a lark. I was supposed to squeeze this in between my Emmy Award party and a flight to Vancouver to oversee my season finale episode. It was supposed to be a cherry on top of my huge crest of success.

I walked inside a large studio filled with bizarre clown paraphernalia, and saw a group of aspiring stand-ups, old and young, of all races and body types, staring at a tallish man in cowboy boots standing beside a microphone stand on stage riser. That man turned to me.

“Kuammmggg right? Hey, have a seat!” A native Texan, the teacher, Cash, was a handsome man with craggy lines on his face, stamping down his shit-kicker boots onto the stained floor as he spoke. He looked at me with wide-open eyes, waiting for me to respond.

“Yeah. Kuang. That’s me,” I murmured.

“Sit over here. We’re clearing now.”

“Clearing?”

“Just sit, Kuanmmg.” He raised his voice, his hoarse Texas accent growing stronger. I went and sat in the back of the class, wary of the eyes of the other would-be comics surrounding me.

A bald middle-aged man stood up, “I’ve had sexual thoughts about my aunt. And my grandmother. And my kitten. All at the same time.” I squirmed in my seat.

One woman got up and simply shouted hoarsely into the mic for a minute, with no actual jokes. Or words. There were some funny folks who got up onstage, but Cash shouted out to them, “You don’t need to be funny! This is just clearing!”

For the next couple of hours, I got to understand what “clearing” was. It was getting onstage and just getting shit off of your chest. As the class cleared, I witnessed the greatest assortment of weirdos I’ve ever encountered. Hollywood burnouts, fringe folks, individuals with serious mental health problems. They were all here at the Clown Palace.

Then Cash himself went up to clear. He told us about how he self-destructed a promising comedy career to end up here, teaching comedy at the Clown Palace. “Here, I’m among my people, my fellow clowns.” Cash smiled wildly, pointing to the eerie jester statues and paintings throughout his studio. “There’s Jack, Devon, and Ulysses. They’re way better company than club promoters or industry people. They don’t talk!”

I wanted to get out of there. This wasn’t my tribe. I came from a good upbringing. I had Hollywood options. But here was the truth. Mental health struggles? Check. Hollywood reject? Check. Unemployed? Check.

“Kuannngggm? Do you want to go up and clear?” Cash again looked straight at me.

I looked away. “I’m sorry. No, I need to head home.”

He put up his hands, “It’s gonna be good for you, man, trust me.”

I grabbed my car keys and phone. “Sorry. Gotta go.” I rushed out of there. I quickly looked behind me, where the comedy weirdos watched me leave.

The next morning, my body and mind railed against me. I had nowhere to be, no real purpose. That realization expanded into an existential uselessness throughout the day. It only subsided in the late afternoon. The medication that my psychiatrist recommended? It wasn’t kicking in yet.

Glum, I listened to another voicemail from my mother. “You haven’t called in a few days. What’s going on?” I texted instead of calling her back. I wrote that I was fine. That it was just a work thing. She texted back immediately. “Did something happen with your job?” I ignored that text, but another one came quickly from her. “Kuang, your father wants to talk to you. Can you call us back?”

This wasn’t the first time my mother called on me on my father’s behalf. But that time, it was Baba’s depression she was concerned about, not mine.

* * * 

One evening, when I was a sophomore English major at UCLA, my mother called me at my dorm room, when I was about to go out to the apartment parties near campus. I was ready to drink cheap Keystone beer and meet girls.

“I think you need to come home for a few weeks”, she told me.

“Why?” I was looking out my dorm room window. The night beckoned. I could already hear the sounds of the Friday night partying, the tinkling laughter, the clinking of glasses. My friends had told me to meet them up at the party on the corner of Gayley and Westwood. Annie said she actually had some mushrooms tonight.

My mother’s voice knocked me out of my wishful thinking. “Your father’s having some problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Problems with his nao tze.” That was the Chinese word for brain. Looking back at it now, almost 25 years later, it’s significant that she didn’t actually say the word depression. That was typical of our family, and actually the entire Chinese culture: keeping a stoic face during a severe mental health crisis.

“Problems with his brain? Um. Can you give me a little more context?”

“Just come home. Tomorrow!” My mother’s brisk voice rattled into my landline phone. She had lost her patience with me. Click.

I came back home from UCLA, back to my suburban home in Agoura Hills to help take care of my father, because Baba’s depression (or problems with his nao tze), made him incapable of self-care. That was the first time I had heard of these words, this kind of mental health condition, and my mother tried her best not to talk about it while I was at home.

* * * 

After the Clown Palace encounter, I met with my own psychiatrist. Dr. Wong was a Chinese-American man in his sixties who rocked John Lennon glasses, his office featuring pretentious South American and African furniture.

“I got that particular piece in the early ’80s, during my travels to Brazil.” He swelled in pride while talking about his precious items.

Meanwhile, I was in a full-blown mental health crisis. “Can we talk about my situation, Dr. Wong?” I finally whispered, unable to continue our conversation about from which boutique art dealer he got his finely carved Brazilian table. At a steal.

He scratched his beard, looking at me as if I was a puzzle he was trying to solve. “How is the Lexapro doing?”

“Like I said, it hasn’t kicked in yet.”

“You still have the anxiety and depression symptoms?”

“Yeah. Dread in the morning. Anxiety and depression throughout the day. Sometimes I wonder if even worse when my parents try to help me — ”

“You can talk to your therapist about that.” Dr. Wong quickly cut me off. I guess that wasn’t his responsibility.

“Noted.” I tapped my foot, anxious.

“You should start feeling the medication soon. The anxiety and depression should level off shortly.” A pause, then Dr. Wong continued, “What are your plans after that?”

“What do you mean, what are my plans? Once I get through this, I’m going to stop taking the Lexapro and get back to my life.”

He looked at me again, a gaze that made me feel like I was a butterfly on a pin. “I’d advise staying on it.”

“Um. For how long?”

“You have depression in your family, your father in particular. I’d classify you as a depressive. It’s in your best interests to continue on the medication.”

“Forever?”

“If that’s the way you see it.”

“I’m not sure I want to do that.” I shifted in my seat.

“Like I said, you are a depressive. I’ll see you next time.”  He stared at his furniture, the signal for me to get the hell out. I was furious.

“You know, your furniture sucks. It’s pretentious and looks like a middle school kid could’ve carved it.”

I didn’t say that, of course, but I wish I had.

On the drive back to my apartment, I heard a voicemail from Cash. “Hey, Kuannnggmmm. I hope you come back for another class, buddy.” I suppressed the urge to click Delete and finished listening. I could hear the sound of cats, meowing in the background. He continued, “You should at least clear. It’ll be good for you.”

* * * 

The first few days I was back at home from college, I tried my best to help my mother. I’d go grocery shopping for her, and tried to help Baba with what he needed. He was prone to sleeping past noon in those days, the anti-depression drugs making him hazy, tired. One afternoon, while my mom was in the kitchen, getting lunch ready, I approached her.

“What happened to Baba that made him like this?”

She looked at me, blinked a couple of times. “When your Baba was teaching in Taiwan last semester, some burglars snuck into his University apartment and stole money.”

“Oh. Wow. How much?”

“About two thousand dollars.”

That was a lot of money, I thought, but it wasn’t that much money. How did he become a shadow of himself because of just two thousand dollars? He wasn’t physically hurt; he still had his family.

“That doesn’t seem to be enough to cause this to happen,” I said.

“It’s not just that. It’s something that’s physical. A disease of the mind.”

“Disease?”

“It’s part of our family. His mother. Your Nai Nai, she had this too. Depression.” There. She had finally said it. The word that she hid away from for so long. Depression. The word itself made me feel very uncomfortable. A sense of shame bubbled inside me. We didn’t talk about this subject in the family. Why was my mother talking so openly about it now?

“If you feel yourself going through this, Lexapro is the drug that worked for your Baba and your Nai Nai. He’s taking it now.”

“I’m not going to need it.”

“You should just have the information. It’s good for you to know.”

* * * 

My mother came over to my apartment after my visit to Dr. Wong. It started to rain, hard drops onto the Los Angeles cement. She brought over some food from Sam Woo restaurant, setting plates of hot noodles and duck on my kitchen table.

“Did you see your psychiatrist?”

“Yes, I did. His furniture sucks.”

“What?” My mother narrowed her eyebrows.

“Just a joke,” I said. “I’m taking the medicine he prescribed. The same one Baba took.”

My mother smiled slightly, then closed the lids of the takeout, placed them in my refrigerator and gently closed the door.

“How is Baba?” I asked.

“He’s fine. He’s worried about you.”

I pushed my plate away. “I think I’m going through what Baba did when I was in college.”

“I know.” My mother responded, her eyes kind.

Later that night, I got an email from my father, telling me he was thinking of me, just like my mother mentioned. He wrote that he hoped I felt better soon. He told me about the medication that was making his new depression go into remission. Then he quickly got back to telling me about his newest Physics textbook. “It’s my best yet.”

I turned off the computer and went over to my balcony, overlooking the starry Echo Park night. The rain had stopped, and the streets had a lovely glistening texture. Neighborhood folks strolled outside, ready for a night out at the local bars.

I thought of my father. I took solace in the fact that my father had this problem as well. I wasn’t alone. Perhaps I was wrong to keep it all bottled up.

“Thank you for the message,” I replied. “I appreciate it.”

* * * 

I went back to the Clown Palace. It was just Cash inside the studio that day. He was sitting on the stage, on a weathered stool.

“Hey Kuannggmm.”

“It’s Kuang.”

“Sorry about that.” His face became less exaggerated, more open. “What would you like to do today, buddy?”

“I want to work on some material.”

“That’s great. Do you want to do some clearing first? It looks like you have a lot on your mind.” Cash looked at me with empathy. It was a huge change from the cartoon comedian from last week. “You get on this stage, and it doesn’t have to be funny. You just get some shit off your chest.”

A pause from him. “I think you might need it.”

“You’re probably right.” I stepped on the stage and Cash took a seat. The stage was just a platform a few feet off the floor, but I felt high up on a ledge, as if I could fall down thousands of feet.

“I’ve been having some really bad thoughts lately.” The microphone made my voice expand, the volume filling the room.

“Talk to me, brother!” Adam hooted and hollered, as if I was Chris Rock at Madison Square Garden.

I spoke a little louder. “I had some suicidal thoughts, but I didn’t do anything about it. I guess I was never that good at follow-through.”

More barking laughter from Cash. He looked at me. But this wasn’t like Dr. Wong’s clinical look — this was supportive, generous.

“Which is weird,” I continued, “Because I’m Asian. We’re overachievers. I would’ve thought I would have gotten that right.”

“Better than us white hicks from Texas for sure!” More peanut gallery antics from Cash followed, but I was loving it. I was feeling heard.

“I’ve never really been that amazing at anything, if I’m being honest. I’ve always been an average Asian.”

More laughter from Cash. “The ‘Average Asian!’ I love it!”

That afternoon, we worked on some jokes. But really, we worked on my sanity.

* * * 

The journey back to feeling myself again wasn’t straightforward. It was full of twists and turns, from doing therapy to pushing my body to its limits with a marathon. But my self-healing began that day with Cash at the Clown Palace, with a commitment to being honest with myself.

This irony isn’t lost on me. Our Chinese culture is full of stoicism and saving face. Letting it all hang out on a grimy comedy stage was the furthest thing from that. When sadness and despair take hold, we often turn to shame and hide our emotions. This silence only worsens our mental state and deteriorates our self-worth. Although clearing was awkward, weird and sometimes not even very funny, it forced me to be truthful.

Just like my mother took a brave step and opened up about our family’s depression to me, I took her baton, and let it rip on the Clown Palace stage. And that made all the difference.

If you are in crisis, please call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

The post Adventures at the Clown Palace: Stand-up comedy helped me confront my depression and cultural taboos appeared first on Salon.com.

For RNA viruses, such as influenza, survival is equivalent to replication. Every time the virus replicates in a host cell, it presents an opportunity for a mutation to emerge. While viruses are technically not alive, it is their nature to mutate and evolve. Through these mutations, they can become more contagious, evade immunity, and become deadlier. This past summer, as flu season cooled down in the Northern Hemisphere, it intensified in the Southern Hemisphere, giving influenza A (H3N2) another opportunity to mutate — and it did. According to scientists, seven mutations occurred, positioning the Northern Hemisphere to head into a rough flu season.

“This is a small group that emerged since June, and since it emerged, it’s rapidly spreading and predominating in some countries so far in the Northern Hemisphere,” Dr. Wenqing Zhang, head of the World Health Organization’s Global Respiratory Threats Unit, said in a media briefing this month, about the strain H3N2 subclade K.

Dr. Rajendram Rajnarayanan, of the New York Institute of Technology campus in Jonesboro, Arkansas, told Salon via email that the mutations “reshaped the areas that antibodies recognize,” making previous immunity, including immunity induced by the flu vaccine, less effective.

Specifically, Rajnarayanan said, this mutation’s significant antigenic drift, which is when the genes of a virus change, is “a real concern.”

“If you combine the immune escape from this drastic drift with further changes that boost viral fitness as it spreads more (which help the virus replicate better in human airways), you get a season where flu spreads faster, infects more people, and pushes high-risk groups into hospitals sooner, pushing infrastructure and capacity concerns,” Rajnarayanan said.

The signs are already here. In the U.K., Japan, and Canada, there have already been increases in flu cases, leading to an earlier-than-usual flu season. The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) data showed that flu-associated hospitalizations increased from the end of September into October, affecting people over the age of 75.

“Countries hit early may have been caught off guard and are scrambling to ramp up countermeasures,” Rajnarayanan said. “With early alerts now coming from our international partners, we have a narrow window to act — boost stockpiles, issue robust guidance, deploy resources quickly, and reinforce surveillance.”

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One concern is that this year’s flu vaccine was recommended before the new strain emerged. Fortunately, early studies show that the vaccine still offers some protection.

A recent study in the medical journal Eurosurveillance stated “our early estimates provide reassurance that current NH enhanced vaccines provide protection in children, adolescents and adults in the early period post-vaccination. The high VE [vaccine effectiveness] in children and adolescents strengthens the case for optimising vaccine uptake in this group, where we could also see indirect protection of other age cohorts.”

In England, the National Health Service issued a “flu jab SOS,” urging those eligible for the free vaccine to get it quickly and protect themselves this winter.

But public trust in the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is declining, and no such similar call to action has been made. Meanwhile, surveillance of the virus has been lacking. During the record-breaking government shutdown, the CDC stopped updating key dashboards tracking influenza, RSV and COVID-19 activity. While tracking resumed after the shutdown, some public health experts aren’t confident that a tough season will be well-managed by the public health agency under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s leadership.

“I am concerned about everything related to infectious disease under the Trump administration because the chief of HHS is an anti-vaccine advocate and doesn’t even believe in the germ theory of disease,” Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Salon. “He has destroyed the CDC.”

Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist and author of the newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist, told Salon, that it’s important to note that states still collect data to send to the CDC.

“Within CDC, there is an important distinction between political operatives and CDC scientists,” Jetelina said. “The scientists are still in control of the data.”

But streams of data are thinner, Rajnarayanan noted, and more delayed because of the shutdown.

Despite the mutations, Adalja said getting vaccinated is still the best way for people to protect themselves against the flu this season because the vaccine contains three strains. While it’s a “mismatch” for the H3N2 strain, it’s still protects the H1N1 or influenza B components.

“The dominant H3N2 strain has evolved away from the H3N2 included in the vaccine so the vaccine strain is not perfectly matched to it,” Adalja said. “The influenza vaccine remains the best way to protect oneself from the virus, especially against severe disease.”

Rajnarayanan said while masks are “not popular in the USA right now,” they are still a good option for protection.

“Stay home when sick and seek early testing and antivirals if you’re high-risk and develop symptoms,” he said. “Layering these simple measures will significantly reduce transmission and protect the people most likely to become seriously ill.”

The post RFK is in charge of flu season — and trouble may be ahead appeared first on Salon.com.

@itvnews Judi tells ITV News she cannot attend events alone because of her age-related macular degeneration (AMD) which affects her eye sight. #itvnews #judidench #ianmckellen #shakepeare #amd ♬ original sound – itvnews

Dench first revealed her AMD diagnosis in 2012, the same year she starred as “M” for a seventh time, in the James Bond movie “Skyfall.” She gradually stepped back from stage and screen roles as her central vision declined. She once relied on an almost photographic memory to learn scripts, but now must have lines read aloud to her. Even that system, she said, is becoming increasingly difficult as her eyesight loss accelerates.

“I can’t read anymore. I can’t watch television. I can’t see who’s in front of me,” she said.

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AMD is one of the leading causes of severe vision impairment in older adults, with no cure and limited treatment options once vision has significantly declined. While Dench continues to work in limited ways, the new update signals that even those projects may be slipping out of reach.

Still, Dench remains characteristically grounded, crediting her support network and refusing to frame her condition as a reason to retreat entirely from public life. Her candor offers rare visibility into a disability that often progresses quietly and privately for millions. In sharing her experience, Dench embodies not only the personal toll of vision loss but the emotional weight of losing one’s ability to connect with others in the most human way: face to face.

The post Judi Dench: “I can’t recognize anybody anymore” appeared first on Salon.com.

It was my junior year of high school and OxyContin was showing up everywhere, in the hallways at school, parties on the weekend and in medicine cabinets all over central Appalachia. I was with my cousin Eric, who was like a brother, the first time I did an OC. It was fall and we were riding around in the hills when we came across a mutual friend. He was eager to share. OxyContin was unlike anything else. At that time people were excited to introduce anyone they could find to this new drug. We sat in the cab of his truck and split a 20-milligram pill between the three of us. And I knew right then that’s all I ever wanted. If I could feel that way for the rest of my life, everything would be okay. It would become a never-ending cycle, with specific memories sticking out more than others when I look back, but the first time is groundbreaking, life changing. 

I was the senior class vice president of my high school. When I graduated in 1999, I left with a GPA higher than 4.0. I was a tennis stand-out. I was not supposed to be a drug addict. 

But that’s exactly what I became. In 2002, after my third failed attempt at college and living away from home, I returned to eastern Kentucky — and I had no way of knowing what I was coming home to. Over the past year and a half, I had no communication with my friends in the region. OxyContin was everywhere. People I had known my whole life who would have never considered drugs were now full-fledged addicts. 

By that time, the effects of Purdue Pharma’s aggressive marketing campaign were evident all-over eastern Kentucky. In a region plagued by high cancer rates and chronic pain patients due to the physical demands of the coal industry, the numbers for non-OxyContin opioid prescriptions were 2.5 to 5.0% higher than the national average. This was how Purdue Pharma decided where to spend its marketing dollars. During this time, pain became a vital sign, and there were trends to liberate the prescribing of opioids to treat general pain. Purdue Pharma targeted physicians with high opioid prescribing rates and courted them like it was Saturday night. They implemented a patient starter coupon program for free limited prescriptions up to a 30-day supply. If that doesn’t reek of a corporate attempt to get people hooked, I don’t know what does. This was a tactic that street dealers had used for years. But when you put on a suit, and it comes from a pharmacy, people are slower to catch on. By the time the program ended, 34,000 coupons were redeemed. 

The line between nothingness and death is thin. Using is figuring out how much to take to find a magical state of equilibrium. My goal was to find a state of being so far away from living that my only function left was breath. Complete numbness of the body and mind, a shutdown of all parts of my brain that react and obsess over the outside world. The anxiety and obligations quietened as the brain was flooded with feel-good chemicals. 

Immediately I was in a world of possibilities, flooded with boundless energy and no fears. All the social pressures and uncertainty lift. I am exactly who I want to be with no reservations. I liken this to waiting in line for a rollercoaster: Hours of anticipation and achy legs for a three-minute rush. 

But for a brief moment, every day, I was balanced. I would find a job and get out on my own, out from under my mother’s watchful eye. I would finish that degree I had started a hundred times. I would get clean once and for all. This would be it. I didn’t need drugs; I wasn’t like everybody else that cycled in and out of here. I realized my potential. They were just junkies. But in the end, every day would bring the same pain, the same guilt, and shame that would drive my addiction forward. I would chase that relief from myself for as long as I could. I longed for the day that some contentment could be achieved without using chemicals. To move through the world as others do.

The opioid epidemic has been called “the deadliest drug crisis in American history.” Of the 105,000 people who died from drug overdoses in 2023, nearly 80,000 deaths were attributed to opioid abuse. I’m one of the lucky ones.

After years of active addiction and struggle, I finally found recovery through rehab and working the 12 steps. I’m now a small business owner in Hazard, Kentucky; I run a small independent bookshop called the Read Spotted Newt, which fuels my creativity and offers me a way to make amends to the community I abused for years. 

Representation is critical to finding your place in the world. I strive to curate a collection geared toward young readers growing up in eastern Kentucky so they have access to stories in which they can see themselves. In a world that often demoralizes rural Americans, and Appalachians in particular, it is imperative that we understand the value of our experience. For me, this is the antidote for the shame we have been taught to feel about our region.  

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We have been given a unique opportunity to right the wrongs inflicted by the pharmaceutical industry. As part of a national settlement that includes opioid distributors and manufacturers, opioid abatement settlement funds are being distributed among the hardest hit areas of the country. Kentucky will be awarded more than $900 million dollars over the next several years. Through my work with the Sycamore Project at the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky, I’ve made it my mission to ensure that communities and those who have been directly impacted are aware of the funding opportunities, with the understanding that this is blood money and they have a right to be in the room where decisions on spending are being made. This money cannot be used for enforcement, because we know that policing our way out of this problem hasn’t worked. Instead, it will be allocated for treatment, prevention, harm reduction and research. 

Now, from my window at the bookshop on the corner, I see people like him every day. I wonder if he has a home. I wonder if he has anybody who cares where he’ll sleep tonight. That’s something that’s changed since Eric’s been gone. The homeless population. We are at least two, in some cases, three generations deep in the opioid epidemic. People have lost their family homes, and there’s no one to fall back on when times get hard. People are living on the streets, and the faces change every day. We make eye contact, and he reaches for the door handle. He stops outside just short of the door and finishes his cigarette, folding a bandana into a makeshift mask. His clothes are clean, and he’s wearing a backpack. I’m cautious, and that makes me feel judgmental. Right away, he comments that I sell Ale-8-One, an iconic Kentucky soda. “I like this place already,” pointing to the mini-fridge. 

The silence sits between us awkwardly. Struggling to make eye contact, I notice his hands are red and swollen. It’s unseasonably warm, so he’s wearing a T-shirt. I can see knots under the skin in the bends of his arm. We strike up a conversation about a Tom Petty book. He throws out the term “memoir,” which catches me off guard. He tells me about the daughter of a woman he’s been staying with, how she’s an artist. Would I consider hanging her work in the store? He knows she’s good because his girlfriend has her paintings hanging around the house.

I wonder what her house looks like. I see it with a mattress on the floor, clothes thrown about, scarcely furnished. And then there are the paintings and canvases, too small and oddly proportioned compared to the wall. I agree to give her a shot and some space in the store to sell her work. Maybe that’s what she needs. I go back to his use of a literary term for which I didn’t give him credit. He tells me he wishes someone had helped him. He wishes for a do-over. I can see myself where he stands today. I had that chance. I had that do-over. 

I think about Eric — how long he’s been gone, how he was robbed of the benefits of aging and hindsight, how he lives on through my work. How a do-over would have been impossible for him with everyone around him still using. There are a lot of tough decisions in those early years of recovery. Staying away from people you know and love, opening yourself up to strangers, and learning to trust. Trusting when you haven’t been able to trust anyone in years. Maybe you’ve never trusted anyone at all. 

Early on, I stayed clean to please everyone around me. Many people invested time and resources into my recovery, and I didn’t want to disappoint them. I was so tired of letting people down. The people-pleasing kicked in because it’s all I’ve ever known. I had to be good and do good so they would love me. At some point, though, I started staying clean for me. I wouldn’t sabotage myself for fear of failure. I’d trust the process and relinquish control. The days got easier.  

I should have been nervous, maybe apprehensive, that he was here. He picked up a Stephen King book and told me his favorite serial is the “Green Mile” series. I can tell he’s a reader. Probably like a lot of other addicts, the type of personality that becomes obsessed with hobbies and new topics. The kind that becomes so passionate that they must learn it all. So talented and so sensitive. 

I’m curious how often he wants to look around inside. I wonder if he’s only here now to escape the rain. 

“How much for this one?” he asked as he held the Tom Petty book in his hands, carefully rubbing the cover. He begins flipping through the pages.

“$28.95,” I say as I go over to show him some cheaper paperbacks I have in stock. It’s presumptuous of me to think he doesn’t have the money for that book. Instead, he decides on an Ale-8 and an “Odyssey” button for his backpack. His wallet is worn black leather and is connected to his belt by a chain. He digs around until he finds a folded 20 deep in a side pocket. I wonder how long that 20 has to last him. As I ring him up and begin to make the change, he tells me about joining LinkedIn because the job market around here is so tough. 

“Already found me one that pays people to write reviews about hunting equipment,” he looks up and makes eye contact when he begins to talk about writing. 

“It’s only 400 words weekly, and you can work from home. Sounds like a dream gig to me.” I can hear the tone of his voice shift. 

I hand over his change. He doesn’t seem to notice that I didn’t charge him any sales tax. I’ll eat the 20 cents. 

I hate that he is 44, and this could be it for him. Bouncing around from couch to couch, putting needles in his arm, and having to love everything from afar. I wish I could buy that Tom Petty book for him. I wish I could give it to him with no repercussions. As he turns to go, he says he’ll be back to support small businesses. He likes having something like this downtown. I wish there were a way I could do something to help him. But out the door and up the street, it’s pouring the rain, something I seem more concerned about than him. I’d like to know if he’s read “The Odyssey.”

Thirty years later, we are still learning how to navigate this epidemic. Gone are the old adages of tough love and hitting bottom. Now we approach this disease with community — with meeting people where they are. That’s why it’s important for me to live my recovery out loud. To give hope and instill empathy in those who are tempted to give up the fight. In the words of bell hooks, “rarely if ever, are any of us healed in isolation.”

The post Opioids ravaged Appalachia. I’m one of the survivors appeared first on Salon.com.

As things stand, $9.7 million in contraceptive pills, intrauterine devices and hormonal implants purchased by the U.S. government before Trump dismantled U.S. foreign aid programs earlier this year remains in limbo. These supplies were originally intended for distribution in low-income countries, but the administration says it no longer views contraception as lifesaving treatment, and will no longer fund birth control products for other nations. This was all part of the Trump administration’s larger effort to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, which it has described as wasteful and unnecessary.

Since July, nonprofit agencies, such as the British organization MSI Reproductive Choices, have repeatedly offered to distribute the products at no cost to U.S. taxpayer. (Incinerating all that material, on the other hand, is expected to cost more than $160,000). Many of the products remain viable through at least 2027.

“We can’t buy the commodities, but we can arrange to cover the cost of the distribution,” Sarah Shaw, associate director of advocacy at MSI Reproductive Choices, told Salon. Those would include “any repackaging costs, shipping and any import duties that would be incurred” in transporting them to another country.

That offer was made to Chemonics, a private entity that operates the supply-chain management project for USAID and uses the Belgian warehouse as a regional distribution hub. Chemonics told Salon the company would not comment on “specific activities or decisions made on active U.S. government-funded programs,” but said it would “work closely with our U.S. government clients to procure and deliver lifesaving health commodities around the world” and “continue to support the U.S. government’s global health supply chain priorities.”

Florinda Baleci, a Belgian government spokesperson on trade and development issues, told Salon that her country has “explored all possible avenues to prevent the destruction of these contraceptives, including relocation and transfer options to Belgian authorities or international organizations.” While the contraceptives have not yet been destroyed, Baleci said that some have been transferred from the original warehouse in Geel, Belgium, to a different warehouse in another village, apparently owned by the private companies Van Moer Logistics and Kuehne & Nagel. Baleci said four containers remain in Geel.

“It is possible that some products may no longer be usable due to the conditions of transport, but this has not been established with certainty,” Baleci added. 

Tom Demeyer, a spokesman at the Flemish Ministry for the Environment and Agriculture, told Salon by email that as of Oct. 10, 2025, the contraceptives are still in storage and have not yet been destroyed. Furthermore, he added, an incineration ban in effect in Flanders means that incineration plants “cannot accept these goods.”

The U.S. State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

A study published in July by The Lancet estimated that the USAID funding cuts could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030. USAID funding is most likely to reduce mortality related to HIV/AIDS and malaria, according to the study. According to an independent researcher’s estimate of the death toll caused by the Trump administration’s funding cuts, terminations and near-total elimination of USAID, the result is about 88 deaths worldwide every hour of every day.

Shaw, of MSI Reproductive Choices, said it was too soon to know the impact of USAID cuts on reproductive health, as it could take years to collect that data. But she had a few ideas.

“We’re going to see an increase in unmet need for contraception, an increase in unintended pregnancies and, as a consequence of that, increases in maternal deaths,” Shaw said. She added that “increases in unsafe abortion,” were also likely, “but it’s too early for that to show up in the data.”

According to a recent survey conducted by Shaw’s agency with their partners, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa, 86 percent of programs surveyed said they have seen significant impacts as a result of USAID cuts, and specifically impacts on public health and access to contraception.

This isn’t the first time a Trump administration has cut USAID funding in a manner that affected global reproductive health. After Donald Trump first took office in 2017, he reinstated the “global gag rule,” which decreed that global NGOs receiving U.S. funding were banned from providing or offering information about abortion. Later in his first term, Trump expanded the rule to apply to all U.S. global health assistance, and the funding affected by the policy increased from $600 million to about $12 billion.

Ripple effects of that policy were felt around the world: Clinics for teenagers in Ethiopia previously supported by U.S. funding were shut down, and an effort to include HIV testing in family planning in Kenya fell apart. In 2021, Joe Biden’s administration rescinded the rule.

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This time around, Shaw said, the Trump cuts are more significant and the immediate effects more extreme.

“It’s the entire family planning budget that has gone,” she said. “We have never seen anything like this.” Under previous gag rules imposed by Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, she said, “You’d finish out your contract, and then you’re not eligible for renewal.”

This time around, affected organizations had to shut down their operations immediately. “This is why there were so many commodities stuck in the supply chain,” Shaw added, “because they were never able to work through to the end of their journey.”

Caitlin Horrigan, senior director of global advocacy at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told Salon that the Trump administration’s attacks on reproductive health care across the world have been “relentless, chaotic and cruel.”

“Destroying contraception has devastating and long-lasting impacts for women and communities around the world,” Horrigan said. “Without access to family planning, rates of unintended pregnancies, maternal mortality and mother-to-child transmission of HIV will increase; the Trump administration’s actions will cost lives and deny women and girls around the world services that help them stay in school, pursue economic opportunities and climb out of poverty.”

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In the next three sessions, we talked about patterns of behavior, family and workplace dynamics and coping mechanisms. I took pages of notes. I didn’t expect to see results right away, but having a different perspective and a set of new tools for managing my internal chaos made me feel hopeful. And then I missed a session and was too embarrassed to schedule another one. The irony was overwhelming. I’ll get back to it, I thought, just not right now. When I shared this story with a friend, she gave a small, sympathetic hoot and said, “Do you want to hear how many times I’ve misplaced my phone this week?”

Did I ever.

Over the next several months, I heard anecdotes like those all the time, from most of the women I knew and quite a few I didn’t. At a party, a friend of a friend of an acquaintance admitted that she almost didn’t come: Right before she left her house, she had a hot flash and sweated through her T-shirt and then realized there was a load of moldering laundry in the washing machine that she had forgotten about. (“For at least two days,” she said, in a mournful voice that made me think it was probably more like four — not that I was judging.) A woman who knows that I write about women and popular culture told me about this amazing Norwegian series on Netflix that she couldn’t remember the name of. (It’s “Pernille,” FYI.) At a communal coffee-shop table, a stalk of a woman with a mane of gorgeous gray curls sat down, complimented my glasses, and within minutes was telling me the horror story of going through menopause twice as I drank my coffee in gobsmacked silence. This could happen twice?

As the last generation to come of age at a time when both neurodivergence and menopause were considered shameful secrets, Gen X includes a lot of women who arrive at middle age feeling like their brains are broken and not knowing why. It turns out that perimenopause — the symptomatic runup to menopause that can last anywhere from four years to a decade — starts a lot earlier than we were led to believe, meaning you might mistake its symptoms for something else, or brush them off entirely.  It also turns out that Attention Deficit Disorder is not just for boys, as conventional wisdom had always suggested; but because it presents very differently and often much later in life, women diagnosed in adulthood have in many cases internalized decades of symptoms as individual failings.

Trying to discern what’s perimenopause and what’s ADD is tricky because the same hormones are involved. “They really haven’t found a direct correlation” between the two, says Dr. Mache Seibel, physician, menopause coach and author of “The Estrogen Window.” “But estrogen is really important to maintaining certain neuropeptides, like dopamine and serotonin. ADHD is associated with lower dopamine levels, so when those levels start dropping [in perimenopause and menopause], ADHD behavior might increase,” he says. “And then you have serotonin, whose levels impact mood and things like depression and anxiety. Combine that and you have a set of conditions that mimic what goes on in people who have ADD. You don’t know if it’s the chicken or the egg.”

“A lot of people notice cognitive changes in menopause, that they feel foggier and can’t multitask as well,” says Dr. Julie Holland, author of the books “Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You’re Taking, the Sleep You’re Missing, the Sex You’re Not Having, and What’s Really Making You Crazy” and “Good Chemistry: The Science of Connection from Soul to Psychedelics.” “Some women who go on HRT feel like “a veil was lifted” — I hate that phrase, but it’s true. They feel crisper, more focused and less murky. I talk to a lot of women about what to try first: It’s a bad experiment if you have two variables, so you really want to just try one thing at a time.” Seibel likens the before and after of HRT to driving through a tunnel and losing reception. “And then you come out the other side and hey, you have reception. It’s the same with your brain,” he says. “In 90, 95% of women, it’s going to be fine.”

But because perimenopause and menopause have never been prioritized as a subject of medical education or training, figuring out what to try first and how can be a challenge. A 2019 report from the Mayo Clinic revealed that for 58% of medical residents, training in menopause amounted to a single lecture, while 20% had none at all. “Until internists and family medicine doctors see menopause as a threat to health in general, they’re not going to take it seriously,” Dr. Stephanie S. Faubion, Director of the Mayo Clinic’s Center for Women’s Health, told the New York Times in 2021. “They’re going to say, ‘This is one of those female things that will go away.’” No one’s likely to say straight out that women past reproductive age aren’t worth studying or listening to, but that’s definitely the message that women over 50 — who comprise more than a quarter of the world’s population and have a longer average life expectancy than men — have gotten for decades.

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Donna (not her real name), who is 47, told me that when she talked with her primary-care physician last year about what felt like constant brain fog and frequent heart palpitations, the doctor told her it was probably anxiety and prescribed Ativan. “She asked me maybe two things about my symptoms, and didn’t mention perimenopause at all,” Donna recalled, still palpably frustrated. “I wanted to say, ‘You’re a woman! Maybe you should care a little more?'” But while there’s plenty of R&D funds for a constant influx of cosmetic products and procedures meant to keep women looking younger for longer, there’s very little put toward studying the shifts in brain function that, for many women, can feel like an identity crisis. At least until recently. Menopause is “a f**king goldmine,” says Heather Corinna, a sexual-health activist and author of the 2021 book “What Fresh Hell Is This? Perimenopause, Menopause, Other Indignities, and You.” Menopause start-ups, boutique healthcare, celebrity-owned product lines and more, Corinna points out, are stepping into the breach where a much larger body of research should be.

Meanwhile, “the running gag of ‘Is it menopause or is it fascism?’—that’s real,” says Corinna. “It’s both. It’s everything.” Holland echoes this: “There’s fear about what’s happening in the government, but there’s also sadness and sorrow about what’s happening to the planet. And this population of women is raising kids, caring for parents and stretched really thin. We’re multitasking, we’re distracted all the time, we’re scrolling our phones looking at things that make us sad and enrage us,” she says. “The algorithm is not designed to make you feel good or happy, but to feel like, if I don’t read all of this, I’ll be in danger. The things with the most virality are the things that make you angriest.”

And though it’s much easier now to find books and other media taking a range of perspectives on menopause, it’s also easy to be waylaid by influencers, charlatans and factionalism. “There are books by celebrities where they’re like, “There’s a thing that will make you feel so much better, and I just happen to sell it,” says Corinna. “You’ve got the dichotomy of things considered good because they’re natural, like wild yam — there is so much wild yam — and things seen as bad because they’re pharmaceutical. And actual information is lost in this din of marketers on one side screaming ONLY NATURAL THINGS and pharmaceutical companies on the other side screaming with their zillions of dollars and advertising. It’s almost impossible for the consumer to have a good sense of what’s legit and what’s not.”

No surprise, then, that the menopause influencer with the widest appeal seems to be the one telling us what we don’t have to do or wear or buy and not what we should: Melani Sanders, the content creator who launched the We Do Not Care Club to “[put] the world on notice that we simply do not care anymore.” Sanders has 1.8 million followers on Instagram who sit up straight when she runs down daily lists of “things we no longer care about” — everything from unpainted toenails to cleaning the baseboards to looking like Adam Sandler and/or Wesley Snipes (“If that’s how I look, that’s how I look”).

The thing about estrogen, Holland points out, is that it’s an accommodating hormone, and when women stop producing it naturally, many of them also stop trying to do things that seemed important in their estrogen-loaded 20s and 30s — picking up other people’s slack, biting their tongues at work or with family, making sure everyone has everything they need and caring about other people’s opinions. “Perimenopause is more like PMS, where you say ‘I don’t have the bandwidth’ or ‘you need to do this yourself.’” It’s a good time for self-protection, Dr. Seibel suggests: “One woman told me, ‘Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.’”

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This was difficult to say then, and it’s not much easier now. Couplehood and cohabitation have always gone hand in hand: You fall in love and move in together; you get married and buy a house together; the co-mingling of habits, quirks, and material goods is evidence of commitment and maturity. Romantic pairings that don’t prioritize living under one roof — long-distance relationships, for instance — still generate suspicion and unease. And the tacit understanding of romantic success as two people whose love for each other inevitably leads to pair-bonded domesticity means that living alone is still framed as a kind of purgatorial waiting room, the parking lot at the grand institution of marriage. Don’t get too comfortable, you won’t be here forever.

Marriage itself, though, has seen much better days. The marriage rate dipped below 50% in 2010 and has trended further downward ever since. Faith leaders and politicians tend to blame this on women being too educated and independent; economists chalk it up to income inequality; sociologists point to weaponized incompetence and your mother just thinks you’re too picky. But what if it’s not marriage itself that’s falling out of favor, but cohabitation? As of 2023, roughly 3.89 million people are married but live separately, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s “America’s Families and Living Arrangements” report. That number represents less than 3% of married people — but it also grew by more than 25% between 2000 and 2019. More Americans than ever are married but living separately, and more of them are crediting it with keeping their marriages happy.

The phenomenon of Living Apart Together has been called a philosophy, a movement, and even a revolution. But for a lot of people, it’s just confirmation that wanting to be with someone doesn’t mean needing to live with them. “If I had accepted [my ex’s] proposal and then said ‘But I don’t want to live together,’ it would have confused everyone,” says Nicola, a 39-year-old whose traditional first marriage didn’t last long. “It would have been like, ‘There’s something wrong with her.’ But I didn’t even know that was an option.”

A look at Reddit’s “Living Apart Together” forum suggests that she’s far from alone. A majority of people now in LAT relationships discovered them after feeling like they’d failed at cohabitation: the worry that wanting to live apart from the person you love is selfish or deviant turns a lot of great relationships into miserable ones. “We hit a rough patch five years ago and separated,” one post reads. “A little time and distance made us realize how much we love each other, but we never moved back in together because we also both realized that we really, really like living alone.” “I wish I had figured this out years ago,” laments another. “It took until my early 60s, after three divorces.” Living together separately isn’t always an option — but knowing you’re not a freak for wanting to can be a relief regardless.

There’s a bounty of reasons people find it difficult to share a home with a partner: One of you is a neat freak and the other a pack rat; one goes to bed at 9 p.m. sharp while the other works until the wee hours. One of you wants three dogs and the other wants no dogs and one bird. And sometimes it’s just hard to assure the person you love that you’re not rejecting them. “I have somehow always found myself living with partners who are extroverts, while I am a pretty extreme introvert,” says Jenny, who lives alone after a recent divorce. “I can turn it on when I need to and feel comfortable doing so, but I need a lot of alone time. [And] when you’re living with someone, you run out of excuses for how to be like ‘I need alone time now’ that don’t come across like ‘I’m sick of your face.’”

The institution of marriage, after all, has spent a lot of time surveying its entrants through narrowed, accusatory eyes — suggesting, for instance, that having separate friendships and interests is a slippery slope into nefarious territory, or that if you can’t be every person your spouse needs (partner, lover, confidant, friend, cheerleader, shrink) you’re not trying hard enough. LAT relationships aren’t a refutation of marriage, but they are often a kind of corrective to the received wisdom of what marriages should be. “So much of our culture depicts young girls dreaming about their weddings. But every middle-aged woman I know dreams about living alone in the woods, maybe with a dog,” wrote Lyz Lenz in her 2024 book “This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life,” a line that had me pointing in Leonardo DiCaprio–esque recognition when I read it. For those who did everything they were told was important and necessary — getting married, setting up house, having children — an LAT relationship is a fresh new page in their adult lives, a slate wiped clean of instructions and expectations.

“The people in my life who have been weird about it, I don’t think they think I’m cheating on my partner, but they do see it as cheating,” says Nicola, echoing a number of Reddit posts about barbed or resentful comments that accuse LAT couples of playing marriage on easy mode or violating the code of compulsory heterosexuality that sees marriage as a commitment to a spouse and to children but also, in some unavoidable way, to an equitably shared dissatisfaction. Nicola, who doesn’t have children, likens it to an attitude she heard a lot in her early 30s from people who seemed to think her choices were a condemnation of theirs: “Why do you get to skip that part? That’s not fair!”

It’s not surprising that women appear to be the most enthusiastic adopters of LAT life, with the COVID-19 pandemic often cited as an inflection point. Studies consistently show that women in heterosexual marriages and partnerships take on disproportionate shares of chores, childcare, and what’s known as the mental load: making doctor’s appointments, knowing when the oil needs to be changed and the coffee filters replaced, remembering birthdays and arranging holiday plans. Research findings are consistent regardless of work schedules and number of children; indeed, women with more prestigious jobs or higher salaries than their male partners often end up with more to do at home — a kind of gender tax that pops up even in otherwise egalitarian relationships.

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The number of women who refer approvingly to Whoopi Goldberg’s statement on why she’s done with marriage (“I don’t want someone in my house”) on social media and who consider Burton and Bonham Carter “couple goals” despite the fact that they split up a decade ago echoes Lenz’s experience with women hankering for life alone in the woods. One Reddit poster refers to “the fights you won’t have” over things like who didn’t remind someone that the rent was due and who doesn’t know how to load a dishwasher like a civilized human — “the friction that doesn’t even come into existence” because there’s no impetus for it. LAT relationships have their own frictions and pitfalls; they’re just less likely to be about the same set of domestic matters time and again.

And the reasons LAT relationships work are often straightforwardly practical. The high cost of living, for instance, means that two people who live in rent-controlled apartments in big cities will likely be priced out of renting a larger place if they give up those apartments. Partners who both have children often find blended cohabitation a challenge. And then there’s sleep: Very few Americans get enough as it is, and sleep-related changes that come with aging — the need for props like CPAP machines and ergonomic body pillows, menopausal night sweats, or suddenly misaligned sleep schedules — often catalyze LAT relationships.

After being diagnosed with sleep apnea at 56, for instance, “I went from being ‘guy who snores like a mariachi band’ to ‘guy with a vacuum-cleaner hose stuck on his face.’ Neither very attractive, both pretty humiliating,” says Angus. “It just became easier and felt more altruistic to say ‘Love you, I’m gonna head home.’ In the long run, the time we spend together awake is much more important to me.” Nicola speaks semi-reverently about a woman in her 70s who has had two LAT marriages since her 50s but shares sleeping hours exclusively with her three cats. And as someone who sleeps best like the Nordic person I absolutely am not, Cameron Diaz speaks for me with her campaign to “normalize separate bedrooms.”

But I also don’t think we need to call these things “sleep divorce,” either. Living apart together, like traditional cohabitating, is no guarantee of happily-ever-after, but chipping away at the stigma around it is making a difference to people who feel alone in wanting to live separately. “I spend more time wanting to see this person than I would if we lived together,” says Nicola. “I love that we make a choice every day to say that you’re the one.”

The post Why living apart could be the key to staying together appeared first on Salon.com.

But this particular glow-up is so significant in part because it wasn’t very long ago that the prevailing white, Western beauty standard believed the ideal ass to be barely any ass at all. For fashion and beauty industries that treated the female form as a ceaseless work in progress, the butt was just another feature we were expected to make an enemy of. If asses were acknowledged at all, it was only in the context of workouts like “Buns of Steel” meant to keep them under control.

This began to change in the 1990s, when pop culture became a touch less white and the media mainstream was reshaped by women whose very embodiment challenged the status quo with a simple question: What if butts have been awesome all along? Janet Jackson, Salt-N-Pepa, Jennifer Lopez, En Vogue, Rosie Perez and Selena Quintanilla were among the celebrities who exposed the fashion world’s racialized disdain for a conspicuous can; rap’s growing popularity with white audiences, meanwhile, further contradicted conventional less-is-more wisdom. Booty ambassadors like LL Cool J and Sir Mix-A-Lot led a charge of extravagant, infectious rump shaking that crossed over to pop radio and MTV. Butts were suddenly out there — and though it didn’t happen overnight, they were leading a pop-culture paradigm shift.

The inflection point for the fashion and beauty industry came with the double-barreled ascent of Jennifer Lopez, who conquered both the pop charts and the big screen in the latter part of the ’90s. Mainstream fashion magazines whose target audience was white women had for decades filed “butt” under the general category of “fat” and engaged with treating any detectable ass as a sartorial problem to be solved with cleverly cut and inconspicuously tailored pieces. Lopez’s ubiquity confronted them with two suboptimal choices: either acknowledge a history of racial homogeneity or pretend to have always been butt boosters.

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They ended up going with a third thing that managed to be worse: They pronounced that butts were “in,” and presumably counted on being able to make sure they went out just as fast. But though pop culture continued pathologizing bigger butts (in the now-classic 2000 hit “Bring It On,” the unremarkably sized ass of one of the Rancho Carne Toros is mocked mercilessly) and the fashion industry aimed to ignore them, butts didn’t go anywhere but up. In the early 2000s, butts were a bona fide focal point: Brands like rapper Nelly’s Apple Bottom Jeans were cut specifically to fit big-booty Judys, Juicy Couture slapped its name across the seat of its pricey velour sweatpants, and low-rise jeans and thong underwear made the “whale tail” a new way to show skin.

The modern era of ass obsession was ushered in by three women whose butts were, for better or worse, entwined with their careers. There was Beyoncé, whose warning “I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly” on the Destiny’s Child hit “Bootylicious” was both a clapback to body criticism and an affirmation of the big butt as an engine of empowerment. There was Serena Williams, whose dominance in the historically white sport of tennis rendered her athletic build fundamentally suspect, subjecting her to an objectifying scrutiny and racist caricature reminiscent of “Hottentot Venus” Sarah Baartman’s. And there was Kim Kardashian, whose reality stardom and internet-breaking ass normalized the consumer pursuit of bodily perfection as a marker of status rather than a source of shame.

Glossy magazines were offering up tips for “butt beauty” as early as 2008, but the image-based social media platforms that arrived over the next decade made butts an aspirational phenomenon and emphasized that skincare woes below the waist (acne, dryness, uneven tone and more) are no less deserving of care than those above the neck. The emergence of “wellness” and “self-care” as beauty buzz phrases has been key to capturing the zeitgeist: many creators of butt-specific skincare capitalize on past erasure and marginalization to frame their products as defiant and reclamatory. Products like Truly’s Buns of Glowry exfoliating scrub, Megababe’s Bidet Bar soap and Le Tush Butt Mask, Anese’s That Booty Tho resurfacing scrub and Coco Fesse’s Twerk Creme elevate the butt as an underdog whose time has at last come.

But now that the ass has arrived, so has a new set of aesthetic imperatives. Where there was once a single, overarching question — Is my butt an acceptable size? — there is now a checklist of more specific ones: Is it smooth enough? Soft enough? Blemish-free enough? Beauty-review sites create buzz for products that earn them commissions via affiliate marketing with insistent headlines: “Do You Have a Butt Care Routine? You Should,” “Are You Being Kind to Your Butt?” “Is Butt Skincare the New Red Light Therapy?” And butt-care evangelists like Bawdy Beauty’s Sylwia Wiesenberg are enough of a novelty to become big names in themselves; in 2019, Nylon featured Bawdy’s butt sheet masks in a behind-the-scenes catwalk-prep video, dubbing Wiesenberg the “fairy butt-mother” of New York Fashion Week.

Wiesenberg has been trying for the past few years to make “Butts are the new face” happen, and its failure to catch on isn’t just because it’s factually inaccurate. Butts are, after all, the indoor kids of the epidermis. And yet the phrase is correct in the sense that butt care, like facial skincare, is marketed to a largely female audience with promises of newness and rejuvenation and often trumpeting trending hero ingredients like glycolic acid and niacinamide. Butt skincare is also positioned as a daily regimen rather than an occasional focus; as with the 10 and 12-step routines that Korean skincare has made dominant in the U.S., the idea is that butts require consistent and vigilant effort to maintain.

Embracing a previously neglected women’s body part has never stopped beauty brands from pitching products to improve that part’s appearance. (I can’t be the only one who remembers when Dove’s Real Beauty campaign drew attention to a study that revealed a lack of “armpit confidence” among young women and shortly thereafter introduced a deodorant that promised to “turn armpits into underarms.”) The rise of butt-centric skincare is at least an equal-opportunity gambit, designed to fuel self-consciousness about previously unconsidered flaws among the butts of all genders. In the past two years, champions of gender-inclusive “holecare” include FutureMethod, whose slogan “butt health is gut health” expands the market for prebiotics, and Asset+, which touts itself as “the first butt wellness company” and sells, in addition to a $79 “Hole Essentials” bundle comprising anal cleanser and serum, a set of “Butt Art Postcards.”

The beauty industry is currently in a protracted slump that’s been attributed to everything from post-pandemic skincare fatigue to a surfeit of choice that makes brand loyalty a thing of the past. What that means is that the levers of body insecurity and shame that power the beauty industry are soon going to start churning anew, generating fresh flaws to focus on and a revitalized attitude with which to sell us eternal dissatisfaction with body parts that were never meant to be quite this scrutinized. Whatever comes next, hold onto your butts.

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The next day, as the government prepared to shut down, my family packed our bags to leave town for my daughter Naomi’s spinal surgery. On Oct. 2, with the shutdown in full swing, we were settled into the Ronald McDonald House at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital with a community of families who were there fighting for their own children’s health and survival. 

Of the many things my kids inherited from me, one is a rare bone disease that creates rounded bone spurs throughout our bodies. The disease usually means that our bodies make an uncomfortable home to live in, but sometimes the disease turns the pain thermostat up from discomfort to agony.

My daughter’s superpower has always been the ability to pull sunshine into whatever space she inhabits. But beginning in February, the severity of her pain darkened her mental sky. Conversations changed from the whimsical to wondering about the point of living a life haunted by chronic pain. An MRI revealed that a bone spur had developed in her spinal column creating a spinal compression in the C4 vertebrate capable of radiating pain throughout her body, making surgery necessary to mitigate the pain and protect her spinal cord. 

That is a lot of details. But details matter; they are what nearly all families staying under Ronald McDonald roofs across the country are trying to juggle, whether they are rich or poor — or Democrat or Republican. 

The magical news is that, a few days after her surgery, my daughter felt better. Sure, she walked like a drunken sailor — but the truth is that our entire house feels lighter. But here is the thing: Like many other children, Naomi needs to go back because another surgery awaits. And with so much health care for children on the budgetary chopping block, it is not at all clear which of our kids will be lucky enough to continue their journey of healing and receive the treatments their conditions require. 

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With the shutdown in its second week, I’m haunted by the faces of the children and families I saw in Cincinnati. They turn the clinical statistics of the budget into human stories. The truth of where we are as a nation can feel unbearable. Again, details matter. With nearly $1 trillion in cuts to benefits for poor people, lives are at stake. The best projections estimate that over 10 million families stand to lose Medicaid benefits. Nearly 10 million also stand to lose some portion of SNAP benefits that protect families from malnutrition — and children are one of the most impacted demographics. America has a long history of screwing the poor and the marginalized, but never before have so many poor folks stood to lose so much. 

However, if poor parents have reason to mourn, rich families have cause to celebrate. The top 99.8% of the wealthiest families in America stand to receive many more millions of untaxed dollars because of an increase in the estate tax exemption. The children of the wealthiest families now have a $30 million buffer between them and any financial responsibility to the country that created their wealth. Of course, this says nothing of the money that continues to flow to oil companies, war profiteers and private companies producing for-profit prisons. The bank accounts of social depravity have never been fatter.

I know of no living document more reflective of a nation’s morality than its budget. As Jesus said, “Where your money is, there will your heart be also.” And since there is no better measuring stick of a people’s spiritual strength than how we treat the least of these, how we care for children who are sick and poor says everything we need to know about our nation’s soul. And it causes me to tremble.

It’s unclear if our elected representatives will find the moral courage needed for their constituents to survive. Heavy questions hang in the air at Ronald McDonald Houses across our nation, but some things are not in question. 

Families like mine know we do not have the luxury to despair. We will continue to fight for our children, and for their friends and classmates. We will fight now and in the future. Not because we are heroes, but because we are parents — and it is in our nature that in the needs of our children, we find the courage our world so desperately needs.

The post GOP health care cuts will hurt kids like mine appeared first on Salon.com.

Snowball, a sulphur-crested cockatoo, became a YouTube sensation nearly a decade ago for dancing to the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody.” That viral video prompted the first study on Snowball in 2009. The study first concluded Snowball had an advanced musical beat perception.

Then, after the study, Snowball’s co-owner Irena Schulz contacted Aniruddh Patel, a psychologist at Tufts University and Harvard University, when she noticed Snowball had begun to explore new moves that he discovered himself — ones that he would break out in response to music, and which he had not been taught.

After studying his moves in more depth, Patel and his colleagues have concluded they have evidence to believe that parrots and humans share the capability to dance when the music calls them to.

According to the study, published this week in Current Biology, Snowball has 14 unique dance moves that are prompted by music. The study suggests some birds are capable of sophisticated cognitive control and a degree of creativity that is not seen in other species.

“What’s most interesting to us is the sheer diversity of his movements to music,” Patel said in a press release. To test whether or not Snowball could freely groove to the music with a variety of dance moves, the team filmed him to two different tempos: “Another One Bites the Dust” and “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Each song played three times.

Schulz watched from the same room, and refrained from moving herself. She only gave Snowball verbal encouragement. According to the study, Snowball had 14 distinct dance moves, including a “headbang with lifted foot” and a parrot version of “voguing.”

These moves suggests breaking into dance to the beat of a song isn’t only a human thing, specific to certain human cultures. It also suggests that birds possess the cognitive complexity to dance, perhaps more so than primates.

“Parrots are unusual because these complexities are coming together in their brains,” Patel told CNN. “When these capacities come together, it leads to the impulse to dance.”

Since Snowball is the first bird to be studied in this way, researchers don’t know if it extends to other parrot species.

The post Some birds will learn to dance without being taught: study appeared first on Salon.com.

Goodman’s blunt words speak to a reality for many Black and brown Americans: the risks of COVID-19 are real, but perhaps pale in comparison to the day-to-day fear of violence at the hands of law enforcement — an omnipresent mental and physical health threat that predates the virus and may outlast it. Yes, the pandemic is killing Black Americans, but so are the police.

This connection between race and public health has led some local legislatures to propose plans to declare racism a public health crisis. But what does that mean?

To those unfamiliar with the term, public health is the science of studying, protecting, and improving the overall well being of a population. Notably, race has long been considered one of the key social determinants of health — social conditions that determine health status — and the reason isn’t because of genetics. Rather, it’s a result of systemic issues, namely that many communities of color are underserved in many ways.

There’s a psychological reason, too, that the connection between race and health is apt: just as the mind and body are connected, the mental stress of experiencing oppression on a daily basis has a tremendous impact on an individual’s health, and can lead to shorter life spans and more health problems. Hence, in multiple ways, declaring racism a public health crisis makes a lot of sense.

Public safety is public health

Law enforcement is often present in health settings like hospitals. Indeed, police are seen as key partners on many public health programs — they regulate violence against women, public disorder, mental illness, alcohol and drug use, and much more.

“Part of your social well being is feeling safe in your environments,” said Dr. Anna Nolan, a pulmonologist at New York University currently treating COVID-19 patients. Public safety in the workplace, schools, and neighborhoods are all key elements of public health. “Police are first responders,” notes Dr. Goodman, “so they’re part of our public health infrastructure.”

Communities of color “have a lot of police presence, but what are the police doing for public safety?” asks Dr. Rod Brunson, a professor of public life at Northeastern’s School of Criminal Justice and Criminology. While protests have raised awareness of the dangers of over-policing, there are also dangers of “under-policing” which leaves individuals underserved and unsafe in their neighborhoods, as a result of law enforcement’s inability to improve public safety.

Police aggression and ineptitude aren’t mutually exclusive. “There are simultaneous dynamics of under- and over-policing,” said Dr. Brunson. Black, brown, and low-income neighborhoods “get the worst of both worlds.”

Now, law enforcement has been deployed across the country to manage the pandemic. Police and national guards enforce stay-at-home orders, patrol supermarkets, subways, parks, and facilitate food drives. When recounting her experience on the front lines, Nolan notes that “law enforcement are integral to getting people safely to the hospital. Getting them the care that they needed when they needed it.”

Though law enforcement is part of the public health infrastructure, the criminal justice system upholds coercive policing, retributive sentencing, and mass incarceration that contributes to adverse health outcomes.

Violence is a public health issue

Individuals in the criminal justice system have far higher rates of chronic health problems, substance use, and mental illness than the general population. Racial discrimination in policing has shown to increase risk of chronic disease and early mortality.

Fatal force is the most direct way in which the criminal justice system impacts health. In the past year, 1,000 people have been reportedly shot and killed by police. Both Black and Hispanic Americans are killed by police at a disproportionate rate, with Black Americans being killed at double the rate of their white counterparts. The numbers show that police killings increase population-specific mortality rates.

Commonplace arrest tactics can also cause long-term health issues. According to MedPage Today, a clinical and policy resource for health care professionals, poorly performed chokehold techniques can increase risk of anoxic brain injury, stroke, cardiac arrhythmia, or trauma to neck structures.

The violence does not stop upon arrest. Injuries and death are commonplace while in police custody. In many cities, cops have physically harassed detainees while on the ride to the booking station — as was the case with Freddie Gray, whose “rough ride” in a police van proved fatal.

A risky combination: COVID-19 and police brutality

Government response to protests have raised heightened concerns about public health, especially in the wake of COVID-19. Law enforcement have been deployed to demonstrations with full riot gear, including tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets.

As Salon previously reported, tear gas can cause a host of health problems, ranging from eye damage, blindness, nerve damage or even respiratory failure for those who have certain preexisting conditions. The effects of exposure “aerosolize the virus … and that initiates the possible increase in transmission,” Nolan told Salon.

Research conducted by the U.S. Army in 2012 found that personnel exposed to tear gas have a high risk of acute respiratory illness after exposure. These effects, combined with the distress that COVID-19 has on our respiratory system, are apt to be harmful, though there are no conclusive studies on the combination.

Even without the heightened risk created by these “de-escalation” tactics, protests are risky environments. Proximity, whether voluntary or as a result of “being herded or pushed closer together by crowd control, increases risk of being exposed to the virus,” said Nolan.

In other words, law enforcement tactics can raise the risk of coronavirus transmission during and after protests.

Psychological violence

The criminal justice system has its own negative health side effects, and can cause long-term trauma and stress.

In New York City, police report that 20% of stops involve the use of “physical force,” while approximately half of recorded stops involve frisking. Studies suggest physical violence, racial degradation, and homophobia are commonplace in such stops. Critics believe that stop-and-frisk tactics have taken a new, digitized form in what is known as “predictive policing,” a practice that reinforces racial bias through algorithms and big data.

Even in the absence of physical force, police interactions that seem unfair, discriminatory, or intrusive are correlated with negative mental health outcomes. One study finds that nearly all forms of police victimization were associated with psychological distress, anxiety and depression. Police killings of Black Americans were also associated with poor mental health conditions among the general Black population throughout the U.S.

Not only can police cause psychological trauma, they may even target individuals with mental health struggles. Though mental health is not a strong predictor of criminal behavior, two million arrests each year involve people with serious mental illnesses.

Jason Tan de Bibiana, a research associate at Vera Institute of Justice, told Salon that “police are the de facto first responders, jails and prisons have become the de facto mental health hospitals or substance use disorder treatment facilities.” In this system, people are not getting the quality treatment that they need. Brunson added that preexisting conditions before incarceration are only “intensified and worsened by relying on mass incarceration.”

Socioeconomic status is a key determinant of health, and formerly incarcerated individuals earn less than half the income they would receive, had they not been to jail. Entire communities bear economic burdens by taking time off to grieve, go to trial, or organize action. Individuals who report financial strain as children and as adults are more likely to be physically disabled, have more depressive episodes, and have lower cognitive functioning than their counterparts.

“Make every community a healthy place to live”

Cries for police and criminal justice reform — and in some cases, abolition — have been heard around the world. Citizens and experts have advocated for defunding the police and reallocating the funds to social programs instead. Others worry that abolition will cause Black, brown, and low-income neighborhoods to suffer. Debate on how to address corruption in our justice system is ongoing.

“Police are symptomatic of the systemic racism that exists in our society,” Brunson told Salon. Understanding police brutality as a public health problem requires looking beyond the notion of “one bad apple,” and instead examining how the criminal justice system perpetuates systemic disempowerment that has serious health consequences.

When asked how to decrease health disparities, Goodman says, “Make every community a healthy place to live. We have healthy communities in this country. We’ve just chosen to systematically disinvest in certain ones.” Making a community healthy doesn’t mean more police. It means adequate physical and mental health care, well-funded schools, after-school programming, living-wages, and affordable housing.

The question isn’t can we fix health disparities and racism in our criminal justice system, says Goodman — “it’s, ‘do we want to.'”

The post How police are causing a public health crisis appeared first on Salon.com.

If Reddit is to be believed, a “Far Side” cartoon in 1987 that made impolite suggestions about Goodall’s relationships with chimps earned cartoonist Gary Larson an angry letter from the executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute. But Goodall herself, like many scientists, was a “Far Side” fan and responded with good humor: “Wow! Fantastic! Real fame at last! Fancy being in a Gary Larson cartoon!” She went on to write the introduction to the fifth “Far Side” compilation. The anecdote speaks both to Goodall’s truly iconic status and to her unfussy, unbureaucratic and highly adaptable personality, which made her so well-suited to the work she did at Gombe. Not to mention her keen sense of humor (demonstrated by the “chimp-slap” Goodall gave a different comics artist).

Perhaps these qualities also prepared her to weather the slings and arrows of international NGO leadership and public speaking. Once Goodall realized, in the 1980s, that deforestation was rapidly putting the habitat and lives of the chimpanzees of Gombe at risk, addressing that issue became her principal mission, and she left Tanzania to travel the world with the goal of protecting them.

Goodall was born in 1934 in London, as Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall. From early childhood she loved both reading and animals from early childhood, and had many living family pets as well as a beloved stuffed chimpanzee, a gift from her father. Her “first animal research program,” according to her mother, was a study of earthworms to determine how they were able to move without legs, a project she carried out in her bed.

In 1957, Goodall visited a school friend’s family farm in Kenya. She was then working as a waitress and secretary, but already had dreams of living among animals in Africa. She telephoned famous anthropologist Louis Leakey out of the blue just hoping for some advice. That turned into an offer of secretarial work, and then a far more adventurous gig as an observer. Leakey wanted Goodall to live among a group of chimpanzees and study them, in the same way that anthropologists study human groups by observing their daily lives, rituals and behavior.

It took two years for Leakey to secure funding for Goodall, but eventually she and her equally intrepid mother set up camp in what was then known as the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. It was Leakey’s insight that younger women who had not been indoctrinated in the male-dominated norms of anthropology would make the best possible observers, and Goodall became one of the great trinity of primatology research, along with Biruté Galdikas, who studied orangutans and is now a professor in Canada, and Dian Fossey, who studied mountain gorillas in Rwanda until she was murdered by poachers in 1985.

(Robin L Marshall/Getty Images) Dr. Jane Goodall at Sierra Club’s 2025 Trail Blazers Ball in Los Angeles, April 2, 2025.

Goodall founded the institute that bears her name to expand and carry on her work with chimps — a project that has been running for nearly 65 years — and, just as important, to educate humans. The Jane Goodall Institute points to six important findings its founder made that have transformed the human understanding of chimpanzees, our closest relatives in genetic terms, by demonstrating that behaviors previously thought to be uniquely human were, in fact, nothing of the kind.

In 1960, during her first year at Gombe, Goodall observed a chimpanzee she called David Greybeard carefully strip a twig of leaves and use it to root out tasty termites from a mound. That might seem commonplace now, but it was a Eureka moment for Goodall: Like humans, chimpanzees not only use tools but actually make them. As Leakey memorably put it, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

Chimps, Goodall went on to discover, are omnivorous, just like us. They had previously been characterized as entirely herbivorous, like gorillas, Goodall observed them hunting, killing and eating small mammals such as bush pigs and colobus monkeys, by any standard a complicated collaborative enterprise. Indeed, the Jane Goodall Institute now runs a longstanding baboon research project based partly on the fact that baboons are important chimpanzee prey. Chimpanzees are like us in more troubling ways as well, Goodall found; they sometimes wage war on rival groups of chimps, occasionally killing each other. Goodall’s institute works on conservation of chimpanzee habitat and best conservation practices globally, and now has a youth outreach program called Roots & Shoots in 70 countries around the world.

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At Gombe, where she established a research center in 1965 and helped train generations of primate researchers and ecologists, Goodall made minutely detailed observations of daily interactions between chimps, many of them strongly reminiscent of human behavior. Female chimps form close bonds with their babies, but if a mother dies the babies are often adopted by other community members. Goodall also witnessed chimpanzees embracing and comforting each other after the death of a loved one.

”Jane Goodall’s trailblazing path for other women primatologists is arguably her greatest legacy,” Gilbert Grosvenor, chairman of the National Geographic Society, told the Jane Goodall Institute well before her death. “During the last third of the 20th century, Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas, Cheryl Knott, Penny Patterson and many more women have followed her. Indeed, women now dominate long-term primate behavioral studies worldwide.”

Goodall was not solely a chimpanzee expert and animal rights activist, even if those are the issues for which she will be most widely remembered. Just over a year ago she wrote, “And let us pray for the end of conflict, especially the genocide of the people of Gaza. And for those risking their lives to help the wounded and feed the hungry and care for the animals suffering as a result of human violence, cruelty and war.”

While working at Gombe, Goodall married the Dutch wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick; they raised their son, Hugo, in the field. They divorced in 1974 and Goodall married Derek Bryceson, director of Tanzania’s parks, who died in 1980. Goodall earned her PhD, appropriately enough, at Darwin College, Cambridge University. She was a dame of the British Empire, a U.N. Messenger of Peace and the author of many books, including the now-classic “In the Shadow of Man” and “My Life With the Chimpanzees.”

The post Jane Goodall’s work with chimps changed how we see humanity appeared first on Salon.com.

“My jaw dropped,” Alissa, who is also the president of the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told Salon in a phone interview. “I did not expect this major news to happen in our state.”

While there has been some discussion and controversy about vaccines, she said, to announce a cancellation to the mandate is “extreme.”

“You remove the vaccine,” she said. “You risk life, it’s very simple.”

The Florida state Department of Health currently requires students to be vaccinated against multiple diseases to attend school. Despite decades of evidence showing that vaccines can eliminate disease and save lives, Ladapo compared vaccine mandates in schools to “slavery” while announcing the plans. He vowed to end “all of them, every last one of them.”

The effort to repeal will be a piecemeal one. The first vaccine mandates to be reversed would be for hepatitis B, chickenpox, Hib influenza, and pneumococcal diseases, as that can be directly done by the state health department. Under Florida law, other mandated vaccinations would have to be reversed through legislation. As reported by the Associated Press, the health department said changes won’t take place for at least 90 days.

Requiring vaccines to receive an education in the United States is not a new concept. In 1855, Massachusetts became the first state to require that children receive a smallpox vaccine before attending school. By 1963, 20 U.S. states required children to have several vaccines; today, all 50 states have vaccine requirements.

While some states like Florida permit religious or personal exemptions, these school mandates have played a significant role in the fight against many infectious diseases. One of the greatest successes was the elimination of polio thanks to the polio vaccine. Despite successes and medical advancements, immunization rates have been on the decline in the face of increasingly partisan views on vaccine requirements, according to KFF, a nonprofit that focuses on health policy research.

While Alissa said she and her colleagues are extremely concerned and disappointed, she believes “good always comes out of the bad.” Medical professionals in Florida, and around the country, are joining together to “fight” this announcement and “push back,” she said.

“I have never seen surgeons, pediatricians, internists, family physicians, all of us, I can count all the specialties, come together like this,” Alissa said. “You have the societies and organizations in our state releasing statements saying the importance of vaccines and the importance of vaccine mandates in our schools, because that keeps the public safe.”

Indeed, the Florida Medical Association released a statement representing 23,000 doctors stating they “unequivocally” support the “vaccination and immunization of school-aged children.”

The American Lung Association emphasized it’s “committed to protecting lung health for all and routinely recommends vaccines to protect against respiratory diseases,” in light of the news. “We vigorously oppose Florida’s plans to end vaccine requirements, which will put Floridians’ health at risk—especially the nearly 250,000 children in Florida living with asthma,” the association said.

Dr. Gary Kramer, a pediatrician in Miami, told Salon that, as a private practitioner, he will “continue to encourage vaccines on the basis of seeing them as both safe and effective.” He added he will not “dismiss children” if their parents “choose to opt out or take a slower approach to the schedule.”

“With the order set to kick in 90 days from the announcement, people are left wondering what the near and long-term consequences will be on public health and the certainty of a resurgence in vaccine preventable diseases once largely eradicated in this country,” Kramer said. “Pediatricians and schools will play a pivotal role in how this plays out.”

It’s not just medical professionals who are concerned about the repeal.

Following the announcement, the Florida Education Association, a group representing more than 120,000 school teachers and administrators in the state, condemned it. “State leaders say they care about reducing chronic absenteeism and keeping kids in school — but reducing vaccinations does the opposite, putting our children’s health and education at risk,” the statement said.

The Duval County Medical Society said it’s ready to work with “lawmakers, educators, and community leaders to preserve vaccination protections, to educate families, and to strengthen public trust.” Dr. Ali Kasraeian, president of the Duval County Medical Society, said its priority will be to “protect children and families through evidence-based care.”

And everyone is encouraging those concerned to call their lawmakers.

“Call and discuss the detrimental effect of this decision on the health of the children and the health of the public in general,” Alissa said. “We are personally contacting our politicians, as well as our organizations.”

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According to Naples Daily News, many hospitals in the state will also still be encouraging patients to follow the guidance of their doctors when it comes to vaccines, even if mandates are rolled back.

The concerns about a vaccine mandate rollback are urgent, Alissa said. “Vaccines save lives,” she said. “You remove the vaccine, you risk life, it’s very simple.” Alissa added that the rollback could overwhelm the healthcare systems in Florida financially and health-wise, leading to increased morbidity and mortality rates. It could also worsen the shortage of physicians in the state, adding yet another strain on the state’s healthcare system.

“Now we’re going to have to admit tons more patients, take care of them, and treat them while we already barely have the capacity to take care of what we have,” she said. “That is my concern, losing life and overwhelming a system that’s already overwhelmed.”

The post In Florida, there are still doctors who believe in vaccines appeared first on Salon.com.

Health experts were not surprised. Despite popular myths, becoming and then staying thin is not solely a matter of will power. Research has shown for decades that long-term weight loss on a large scale is very difficult, and that it is simply untrue that being healthy means you must have a slender body type.

But the same kinds of popular myths that guided “The Biggest Loser” still have a lot of cultural currency, it turns out. A recent study in the medical journal PLOS One found that TikTok — a social media app in which users post short-form videos, and which is so well-trafficked that last year it became more popular than Google — is spreading the same kinds of discredited health premises that the “Biggest Loser” did, to a younger generation.

In the study, researchers from the University of Vermont, Dr. Marisa Minadeo and Dr. Lizzy Pope, analyzed some of TikTok’s most popular content. They found 10 popular nutrition, food, and weight-related hashtags that each had over 1 billion views, and then within those groups downloaded 1,000 TikTok videos which were analyzed and categorized based on how much they discussed nutrition, food, weight loss and other similar health topics. From there, the 100 most viewed videos were broken down according to their key themes, which as it turned out included “the glorification of weight loss in many posts, the positioning of food to achieve health and thinness, and the lack of expert voices providing nutrition information.”

“The majority of posts presented a weight normative view of health, with less than 3% coded as weight-inclusive,” the study reported. “Most posts were created by white, female adolescents and young adults.”

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The study identifies several key misconceptions among TikTok weight loss proponents. For one thing, they perpetuate the myth of “diet culture,” or “a system of beliefs that worships thinness, promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, demonizes certain ways of eating while encouraging others, and oppresses people who do not match up with the prescribed vision of ‘health.'” While many diet culture assumptions may seem like conventional wisdom, health research has found that weight management and being thin are not automatically essential to health. Instead, bodies have a wide spectrum of natural shapes and sizes, with research indicating that people of all body sizes can be physically and mentally healthy if they pursue proper nutrition and exercise goals in attainable, stigma-free ways.

“Perhaps portraying weight loss would be less harmful if long-term weight loss was generally achievable,” the study’s authors write. “However, as Tylka et. al (2014) discussed in their literature review of weight normativity and weight inclusivity, weight loss interventions almost always fail; only about 20% of individuals who participate in weight loss interventions maintain the weight loss after one year, and this percentage decreases by the second year. The collection of videos glorifying weight loss on TikTok represent a moment in time, but do not show the longer-term effects of weight loss interventions, such as weight-cycling, or repeated dieting and weight loss attempts over many years.”

Since long-term weight loss is usually not achievable, “moralizing food can cause hyper-awareness about food choices, and foster beliefs that certain foods should be avoided because they will cause weight gain or poor health.” Researchers note that such moralizing can lead to the development of eating disorders like orthorexia, or a fixation on eating “correct” foods.

The authors also noted that, although there were countless videos offering nutrition advice, a scant number came from those with expertise in diet and health.

“Of all the videos, 1.4% were created by registered dietitians, suggesting very little expert nutrition advice on the app,” the study points out. “Users without professional knowledge are sharing nutrition tips that can be inaccurate, and often for the purposes of weight loss. These types of videos likely spread and encourage harmful dieting interventions to a vulnerable audience that may not have strong media literacy skills.”

Pope, a nutritionist at the University of Vermont and one of the study’s co-authors, told Salon by email that people who want to avoid dietary disinformation need “to pay attention to who is providing the information. What are their qualifications? What do they know about your particular situation? It’s not necessarily productive for most people to get dietary information from social media, so stepping away from that as a source of nutrition information is probably a good idea.” She specifically added that, based on their research, “our advice” to people seeking to become healthier “would be to not turn to most TikTok accounts to get ideas on how to improve one’s health.”

“More broadly, I’d ask them specifically why they believe their health is tied to their appearance, and whether they could focus on implementing health behaviors regardless of impacts to appearance,” Pope added. “I think in general we need to dismantle the system of diet culture that dominates so much of the discourse around food, nutrition, and bodies in this country keeping people focused on the idea that health and appearance are closely linked, we have control over either, and we should quest towards the thin ideal regardless of the harms that may occur.”

Salon reached out to several nutrition experts not involved with the study for their views. One of them was Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco. As he told Salon by email, he has noticed that all social media (including TikTok) “glorifies thinness.”

“It perpetuates the myth that weight is the primary marker of health,” Lustig explained. “This is untrue. The issue is that the fat you can see (the subcutaneous fat) is protective for health. It’s the fat you can’t see (the visceral and the liver fat) that is dangerous. But these deposits are not what you measure on the scale.”

Dr. Nicole Avena, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Mount Sinai Medical School and a visiting professor of health psychology at Princeton University, wrote the book “Why Diets Fail: Because You’re Addicted to Sugar.” She observed to Salon by email that “anytime you open TikTok or Instagram, your feed is most likely flooded with viral recipes and food hacks that perpetuate toxic diet culture. From internal showers to eating cloves of garlic as natural antibiotic, most influencers posting about fad diets do not have a background (or degree!) in nutrition or medicine.”

Avena added, “This type of ‘propaganda’ leads the public to think that someone who is genetically thin versus who is genetically not can get results from restriction, crazy trends, and extreme exercise.”

But Avena had advice for people who are concerned about eating and exercising in healthy ways.  As she advised, “eat whole foods from the earth, reduce your overall added sugar intake, and do something you enjoy as physical activity. This type of lifestyle gives no hard boundaries, no crazy potions, and is research backed.” She specifically advocated making sure that at least half of your plate has vegetables, unprocessed whole grains and high-quality protein. In addition, she argued that “physical activity comes with time and discovering what you actually like to do, rather than forcing yourself to do the latest spin trend for example will help you stay consistent.” She also urged people to eat sugar in moderation, rather than “restricting so much so that you binge on it later.” The key is to “reduce your sugar over time, as opposed to cold-turkey.”

For his part, Lustig noted that “the most important measure for health is the waist circumference. If you have a waist smaller than your hips, then you have health. If you have a belly larger than your hips, then you need to do something. The best thing to do is to cut the sugar.”

When asked if people focus too much on their weight, Lustig pulled no punches.

“Absolutely,” Lustig told Salon. “In most people’s minds, people think weight and calories are the same. Focus on the food, not on the weight or the calories.”

The post How TikTok is helping spread diet culture myths appeared first on Salon.com.

“We want to be a bit careful in claiming any evidence of life at this stage,” cautioned lead author Nikku Madhusudhan, of Cambridge University, about the findings he published last month in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a publication of the American Astronomical Society, with other researchers from two American space institutes and two British physics and astronomy departments.

“We have to look at a lot more molecules, and we have, and we couldn’t come up with a much better explanation,” Madhusudhan told Salon in a video interview. He admits he can’t be 100% certain that dimethyl sulfide, or (CH₃)₂S, exists on the planet called K2-18 b. But it looks very likely, as last month’s research built on a paper published in 2023 that also found suggestions of DMS on the same planet but relied on different evidence.

It means life — at least on our planet 

But why would a random compound detected on a planet so far beyond our reach be a strong indicator of life? Well, let’s consider the story of DMS on Earth, a story of the strange and poetic ways life appears and reappears in different guises — and with different scents.

Dimethyl sulfide is the largest natural source of atmospheric sulfur on Earth, which means that it gets into the atmosphere and cycles around. But it starts its journey in the ocean. You’re absolutely familiar with DMS, even if you’ve never heard of it before. It’s the source of the smell of the sea, that sort of fishy, sort of eggy aroma that evokes deeply nostalgic reactions in, well, almost everyone.

Interesting pushback came from Christophe Laudamiel, a master perfumer at Generation by Osmo. “I have personally never used that ingredient for the smell of the sea,” he told Salon by email. “It would be rather used for ‘hot’ smells and for ripe to overripe smells.” He compared the odor of DMS to “fish that stayed too long in the sun,” adding, quite understandably, that “we usually avoid” such associations “when we recreate the smell of the sea in perfumery.”

Rather than relying on those fish-rotting-in-sun odors to get ocean-smelling perfume, suggested Generation by Osmo founder and CEO Alex Wiltschow (also by email), “We combine aquatic notes with mineral wet stone notes, salty notes and clean air notes,” along with, perhaps, “a touch of seaweed absolute as well or mossy top notes.”

Similarly environment-evoking are the substances geosmin and petrichor. Petrichor is the pleasant, earthy aroma of rain falling on dry soil, sometimes described more simply as the smell of rain. That word has almost become trendy. In fact its use appears to have skyrocketed in the past quarter-century, though it was coined in the journal Nature in 1964. Like geosmin, the substance that gives earth its characteristic “earthy” odor, petrichor remains close to the ground. Dimethyl sulfide, however, gets around.

The sulfur and carbon cycles

The DMS that cycles around our world is produced, for the most part, by marine organisms, most notably the microscopic plants known as phytoplankton that live in the nutrient-rich upper layer of the ocean. These tiny organism exist in abundance, which is why DMS is responsible for most of that smell we associate with the seaside.

From the surface layer of the Earth’s oceans, DMS, which is a volatile chemical, escapes into the air, joining the atmospheric cycling of sulfur. As one researcher describes this process, once in the atmosphere DMS “has other major effects, being the ‘seed’ that sets off cloud formation over the oceans. Indeed, the production of this molecule is on such a scale that it has major effects on the world’s climate, thanks to its effect on the cloud cover over the oceans.”

That quotation is nearly 20 years old, but scientists still don’t know exactly to what extent DMS is responsible for seeding clouds, just that it’s a significant factor. The tiny aerosol particles formed when DMS molecules are zapped by sunlight and other molecules in the atmosphere, which become the “seeds” for clouds, also exert meaningful effects on our climate by reflecting sunlight back into space.

In 2007, scientists at the University of East Anglia discovered that a single gene could produce dimethyl sulfide from dimethylsulfoniopropionate, or DMSP, the food that phytoplankton eat. As described in a paper in Science, you can take that gene, which has the catchy name dddD, from bacteria that live in the sea, or find it in other species of bacteria that hang out with plants instead but also produce DMS. Once you’ve found a bacterium with the dddD gene, you can clone it and stick it into an E.coli bacterium, which will then happily produce dimethyl sulfide. The aforementioned predecessor chemical DMSP is found, by the billions of tons, all over the world’s oceans, seas and seashores. Marine plants and phytoplankton use it to protect themselves from the saltiness of seawater, literally as a buffer against stress. When these tiny plants die, some of their DMSP becomes available, as food for other bacteria. Terrestrial plants may also have symbiotic bacteria living in their root systems, which produce dimethyl sulfide from the DMSP released when their hosts die.

This process — one kind of organism dies, offering sustenance to others — is how this cycle begins, at least on Earth. (If you can actually say that a cycle has a beginning or an end.) As one of the East Anglia scientists, Andrew Johnston, wrote in a 2007 project funding proposal, describing the role of DMS in seeding clouds, its importance has been known since 1971, “with some 30 million tons of it being liberated into the air, worldwide, every year.”

Aquatic bird species such as sea petrels and shearwaters are attracted to the ripe-fish aroma, while Johnston later discovered that the Atlantic herring has strains of bacteria in its gut microbiome called Pseudomonas and Psychrobacter, which digest DMSP and break it down into, yes, dimethyl sulfide. How did those bacteria get inside a fish? Herring eat small plants known as mesozooplankton, which themselves eat the much smaller phytoplankton. This familiar ecological pattern — bigger creatures eating smaller creature — has internalized the production of this evocative and volatile gas.

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Thanks to the food chain, it seems, the creation dimethyl sulfide can take place not just in the surface layer of the ocean, but inside herring guts as well. Herrings are vertebrates, in the greater evolutionary scheme not all that different from us. Does this mean that humans also have the potential to create sulfurous stinks from our own insides? Well, there’s no evidence at this point that our microbiomes contain DMS-producing bacteria. But that’s ok. As you may be aware, our species can produce our own glorious forms of stink.

Dimethyl sulfide is an essential element in the characteristic odors of blood, serum, tissues, urine and breath in people (and rats). Not to mention the distinctive smell of feces and flatus, i.e., farts.

Why farts smell like farts, and some plants smell like death

Let’s mention here that dimethyl sulfide is emitted during wildfires, and so contributes to a scent that has grown chillingly familiar in many parts of North America in recent years. It’s also largely responsible for the smell of the delicately-named dead horse arum, a relative of the so-called corpse flower, or titan arum.

Other flowers with unappetizing odors use different chemicals as their top notes, all with the purpose of attracting pollinators drawn to the aroma of their preferred type of rotting meat. Here for example is Wikipedia’s almost lyrical rundown of the various sources of the corpse flower’s scent: “Analyses of chemicals released by the spadix show the stench includes dimethyl trisulfide (like limburger cheese), dimethyl disulfide (garlic), trimethylamine (rotting fish), isovaleric acid (sweaty socks), benzyl alcohol (sweet floral scent), phenol (like Chloraseptic), and indole (like feces).” Scientists comparing the molecules involved in producing the stench of dead horse arum with those produced by a rotting corpse found that dimethyl sulfide was associated with the middle stage of decomposition in actual corpses (to be clear, this involved dead mice, not dead horses or human cadavers).

All this odoriferous research has convinced some scientists that DMS is intimately associated with life, making it an ideal biosignature if found hundreds of light years away on some lonely planet.

Critics of Madhusudhan’s findings point out, however, that dimethyl sulfide can exist without demonstrating life at all. For one thing, you can make it in a lab.

As the perfumer Laudamiel told Salon, DMS is “often used in perfumery, but not for its low-tide, rotten egg facet.” The human nose can detect one part per million of DMS, as an unpleasant, cabbage-like smell used, for example, to add a warning signal to the poisonous gas carbon monoxide, which is otherwise odorless natural gas. DMS also results from kraft pulping, producing a ghastly, retch-inducing smell you’ll have noticed if you’ve ever driven by a paper processing plant. It’s produced naturally as bacteria do their work on dimethyl sulfoxide waste in sewers.

When it’s not saving us from asphyxiation or carrying out useful industrial processes, dimethyl sulfide also lends its “low-tide, rotten egg facet” as a nearly subconscious flavor in food and drinks, measured in a few parts per million. In brewing certain lagers, though, breweries may want that slightly funky flavor, and add enough DMS to cross the flavor threshold as a hint of the ocean (or of distant rotten eggs, or cabbage).

The natural production of DMS is also medically useful. It turns out that as a kind of bacteria turns from existing peacefully in our mouths to causing colon cancer in our nether regions, it produces dimethyl sulfide. Worsening osteoporosis in older women may lead to exhaling DMS, as can the positive effects of a medication cocktail for children with cystic fibrosis.

But how is it that the compound that gives us the glorious smell of the sea — and just perhaps, our first evidence of life on a distant planet — also provides the generally disagreeable fragrance of flatus, feces and flowers that smell like rotting meat?

“It works just like salt in a cake,” explained Laudamiel. “In combination with other molecules, at low, unrecognizable dosages, it brings out the flavors of other facets.” Unpleasant-sounding flavor notes such as “the overripe ‘vomity’ note found naturally in papaya … the ‘feet’ note found in Parmigiano or the ‘sweaty’ note found naturally in dark chocolate” produce magical effects in combination with others and in just the right amount. Remove those notes, he concluded, and your papaya, cheese or chocolate will “taste much less yummy.” Indeed, DMS, provided by nature at just the right dosage, is a component in the much coveted scent of truffles.

The search for smelly life in space

Turning away from our planet with its stinky-feet cheese, vomity papayas and sweaty chocolate, and turning to the stars, DMS is used as an additive in rocket fuel, added to ethylene oxide to prevent exhaust nozzles getting dirty and stop carbon building up on firing-chamber surfaces.

But no existing or planned spacecraft can get us anywhere near the next possible known source of dimethyl sulfide on K2-18 b, the planet where Madhusudhan and colleagues have found, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, what they think could well be this signature of life.

Astronomers these days are really interested in sub-Neptune planets, meaning those with diameters larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. It’s an exotic niche that doesn’t exist in our solar system, and could offer new possibilities for finding life. They’re particularly interested in a newly-defined type of planet that could exist within that range: Hycean worlds, which would possess water-rich interiors, planet-spanning oceans and atmospheres rich in hydrogen gas. The Madhusudhan team’s detection of methane and carbon dioxide gases on K2-18 b supports his argument that the planet might have surface water, as does the fact that they did not find ammonia, which is soluble in water — if that’s detected in the atmosphere, there probably isn’t an ocean.

But while DMS is a biosignature here on Earth, other scientists point out that it could be cooked up by some other process elsewhere, just as it can be produced in a laboratory for industrial purposes. Some scientists have suggested other possible explanations for the signals found by Madhusudhan’s team, including statistical noise. Two findings within the past year bolster these criticisms. One, described last October, is the presence of dimethyl sulfide in a comet named 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which no one would argue suggests biological activity.

Madhusudhan says that does nothing to disprove his hypothesis; comets are known to be little laboratories that can cook up all sorts of unlikely things. “The same comet also has molecular oxygen in it, right?” he countered. “It also has methane and other molecules, including amino acids.” Finding something in a comet, he said, “doesn’t mean that it can’t be a biosignature in a planetary atmosphere, because those are two very different environments.”

Another finding that may cast doubt on the idea that DMS equates to the presence of life is the discovery of dimethyl sulfide, which here on Earth makes the sea smell like the sea, drifting around in deep space between the stars. Reporting on the open science platform Arxiv in February, an international group of astronomers said they found DMS during an ultra-deep molecular line survey, which uses fancy telescopes to look at a spectrum of wavelengths in one particular stretch of outer space and then catalog its chemical composition and physical properties, such as temperature and density. In this case, they pointed their telescopes toward a Galactic Center molecular cloud named G+0.693-0.027.

And there they found dimethyl sulfide, just vibing in the void.

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