Is Covid During Pregnancy Linked to Autism? What a New Study Shows, and What It Doesn’t
Massachusetts researchers examine how growth and learning are subtly shaped among children whose mothers had covid while pregnant.
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Massachusetts researchers examine how growth and learning are subtly shaped among children whose mothers had covid while pregnant.
Louisiana health officials appear to have deviated from the usual steps for public health communications amid a whooping cough outbreak after it killed two infants.
Local governments have received hundreds of millions of dollars from the opioid settlements to support addiction treatment, recovery, and prevention efforts. Their spending decisions in 2024 were sometimes surprising and even controversial. Our new database offers more than 10,500 examples.
States, counties, and cities are receiving millions in opioid settlement money to address the addiction crisis. The ways they spent the dollars in 2024 sometimes drew criticism from advocates and at least one state official, who alleged misuse.
Florida’s surgeon general, spiritual healers, and Trump allies push their cures in a swampy outpost of anti-government absolutism and mystical belief.
A standoff in Congress is keeping much of the government shut down as open enrollment begins in most states for Affordable Care Act plans. Democrats are demanding Republicans agree to extend ACA tax credits, but there has been little negotiating — even as customers are learning what they’ll pay for coverage next year. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is telling states they can’t pass their own laws to keep medical debt off consumers’ credit reports. Paige Winfield Cunningham of The Washington Post, Maya Goldman of Axios, and Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico join KFF Health News’ Julie Rovner to discuss those stories and more.
Florida has announced plans to end mandatory vaccination. Now scientists are assessing which of several diseases deadly to children — whooping cough, measles, polio, rubella, mumps, diphtheria, and tetanus — are likely to make a resurgence and when.
Some advocates and lawmakers want to impose national regulations on the gambling industry but would settle for reining in excessive betting at the state level.
Two major nutrition programs — SNAP and WIC — are likely to exhaust their funding in November, and the furloughs and firings at the CDC have left the agency unable to perform some of its major functions. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump’s new IVF policy is being met with dissatisfaction from both sides. Shefali Luthra of The 19th, Alice Miranda Ollstein of Politico, and Rachel Roubein of The Washington Post join KFF Health News’ Julie Rovner to discuss those stories and more. Also this week, Rovner interviews KFF Health News’ Katheryn Houghton, who wrote the latest “Bill of the Month” feature.
Recommendations surrounding covid vaccinations and other such shots have been confusing. Ultimately, though, little has changed. Here’s what you need to know.
Despite a poisonous political climate, hundreds of volunteer advocates put partisan differences aside and pressed Congress to help people with cancer.
The health secretary’s statement doesn’t consider the impact that the Medicaid cuts advanced in the same law will have on health care in rural America.
President Donald Trump called the Digital Equity Act unconstitutional, racist, and illegal. Then the $2.75 billion program for rural and underserved communities to gain internet access disappeared.
Biomedical researchers and patients are caught in the middle as the Trump administration continues its campaign to strip grants from universities accused of bias. Courts have restored some frozen funds to California universities, but academics studying brain tumors, lung cancer, and strokes worry their grant dollars remain a bargaining chip.
The Trump administration has restored promised funds to a program that teaches people in health care how to work with aging Americans.
Amid concerns that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is undermining trust in vaccines and public health science, some states are seeking new sources of scientific consensus and changing how they regulate insurance companies, prescribers, and pharmacists. Colorado has been at the front of this wave.
The evidence is unequivocal: Vaccines do not cause autism. Yet adding autism to the list of conditions covered by a federal payout program, as health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems inclined to do, could threaten its financial viability. Such a move also would suggest that the science is unsettled, that vaccines may be riskier than diseases, which is a fallacy.
People who maintained the nation’s land-based nuclear missile arsenal are coming down with similar cancers. The Air Force is wrapping up a large study of the health risks they may have faced.
Barbara Kingsolver won a Pulitzer Prize for her bestselling novel about Appalachia’s drug crisis. She invested some of the proceeds into a home for women trying to beat substance use disorders.
At a recent meeting of a key vaccine advisory panel, members debated changes to the timing of hepatitis B vaccination, while largely ignoring the risk of early childhood transmission from day care or household contact. A few days later, President Donald Trump did the same.
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