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US Formally Exits World Health Organization, Locking in Trump’s Break From Global Health Body
The United States has formally completed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO), the Department of Health and Human Services announced Thursday.
Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office in 2025 announcing the intention of the U.S. to withdraw from the WHO due to its mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic and a host of other issues the president took issue with, such as “onerous payments” that didn’t match contributions from other member states.
A year later, nearly to the day, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of State announced that the withdrawal from the health organization is complete. The U.S. has been a member of the WHO since its establishment in 1948. The WHO is a specialized agency within the United Nations responsible for coordinating global public health efforts, including disease surveillance and outbreak response.
E.P.A. Promises a Ban on Animal Testing by 2035
The Environmental Protection Agency will stop using rabbits, mice, rats and other mammals to test the toxicity of chemicals by 2035, the agency said Thursday.
Animal rights groups praised the move, while some environmental organizations said they worried that understanding the link between chemical exposure and cancer, or developmental or reproductive issues, would be harder to ascertain without animal testing.
Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, announced the new policy and said it revives an effort begun during President Trump’s first term. While some testing will still be required to meet legal obligations about the safety of chemicals, Mr. Zeldin said the agency has been working to adopt methods that do not involve animals. “We are confident we will continue to find in the weeks and months ahead, new technologies, new alternative methods that allow us to reduce animal testing on something that might be required today but it may not be necessary just a few months from now,” Mr. Zeldin said. The ban does not address fish or fish larvae.
The announcement comes on the heels of deep cuts to E.P.A. staffing levels, and the elimination of the agency’s scientific research arm that had been responsible for developing replacements for animal testing. During President Trump’s first term, the E.P.A. moved to end testing on mammals by 2035, with an interim goal of ending it by 2025. That timeline was dropped during the Biden administration, when scientists concluded that a phaseout was premature.
Trump Rollbacks Put Children’s Health at Risk as Pollution Increases
On the morning of Jan. 10, when the federal government said it would stop prioritizing how many lives are saved by cutting air pollution, Sonya Sanders flashed back seven years to when a fossil fuel facility near her South Philadelphia home exploded. The 2019 blast rattled windows across the city and could have killed thousands if the wind had blown another way. A cloud of toxic pollution spread for more than 7 miles and impacted more than a million people.
Then she thought about the quieter emergencies that never make the news: the asthma attacks on the rise in her community. Increasingly, youngsters in her neighborhood tug on inhalers at night or are left wheezing after walking past truck-choked roads to the bus stop.
Philadelphia children are more than three times as likely to have asthma as the average American child, a pattern tied to spikes in particulate pollution from the factories and highways that ring the city. Making matters worse, Black children in the area are hospitalized over four times more often than white children for asthma-related illnesses.
Study Questions Benefit of FDA-Cleared Device for ADHD
A phase IIb trial in England suggested that a stimulation device cleared by the FDA in 2019 for children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may not be effective.
In 150 children and adolescents, those treated nightly with the Monarch external trigeminal nerve stimulation (eTNS) system for 4 weeks had no significant differential treatment effects in ADHD-Rating Scale total scores compared with participants on sham TNS, reported Katya Rubia, PhD, of King’s College London, and colleagues.
Most secondary outcomes also didn’t differ between groups except Mind Excessively Wandering Scale total scores at week 4, which significantly favored real TNS.
“The findings of this large, double-blind, multicenter RCT [randomized controlled trial] do not provide support for TNS as an effective treatment for ADHD,” Rubia and co-authors wrote in Nature Medicine.
HHS Bars Research Using Human Fetal Tissue from Elective Abortions
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reported:
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today ended the permitted use of human fetal tissue from elective abortion in agency-funded research. The new policy advances the Trump Administration’s priorities to uphold the sanctity of human life and modernize biomedical science. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s directive applies consistent restrictions to grants, contracts, and programs administered across HHS.
“HHS is ending the use of human fetal tissue from elective abortions in agency-funded research and replacing it with gold-standard science,” Secretary Kennedy said. “The science supports this shift, the ethics demand it, and we will apply this standard consistently across the Department.”
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which distributes most HHS medical research funding, is applying this policy across the NIH Intramural Research Program and all NIH-supported extramural research, including grants, cooperative agreements, other transaction awards, and research and development contracts.
This action supersedes prior NIH guidance and reflects a shift toward validated research models better suited to today’s rapidly evolving scientific landscape, which includes advances in organoids, tissue chips, computational biology, and other cutting-edge platforms.
The Trump Administration Is Creating Clinical AI Agents With a 3-Year FDA Approval Timeline
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) is soliciting proposals to develop two agentic artificial intelligence assistants for clinical care. It hopes to set a novel regulatory precedent with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the use of generative AI in high-risk settings.
To date, only predictive AI technologies have been approved by the agency. President Donald Trump’s ARPA-H is taking a big swing at creating and deploying generative AI to extend the healthcare workforce.
The Agentic AI-Enabled Cardiovascular Care Transformation (ADVOCATE) aims to develop the first FDA-authorized agentic AI technology that can provide 24/7 specialty care. The program will select teams of innovators to create a patient-facing AI agent for cardiovascular disease, which results in 200,000 deaths per year, though treatments are inexpensive and widely available.
