05a Health

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Congress often appears to function via the mantra of “one step forward, four steps back.” Even when policymakers take action — as in recent steps to fight fraud in government programs — they continue to ignore bigger issues with entitlement spending.

The annual release of the Medicare trustees’ report illustrates the problem. This year’s report showed that, by the end of last year at least, the administration’s anti-fraud efforts had not delayed the program’s (technical) insolvency date. Meanwhile, another year passed without lawmakers acting to fix a program that has been functionally insolvent for years.

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Republicans are calling on federal authorities to impose stringent regulations on the abortion drug mifepristone, citing the dangers posed by the drug’s largely unregulated use to Americans’ drinking water. A coalition of 15 red state attorneys general is urging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to add mifepristone to the agency’s Contaminant Candidate List, which would likely trigger safety studies and potentially stricter regulations under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The latest state to join the effort was Indiana.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita (R) said in a press release this week that the use of the abortion drug is “causing pain and suffering to women. … Obviously, this starts with the individuals persuaded by Planned Parenthood and Big Pharma to use mifepristone to abort their pregnancies, but increasingly it extends to other women who might ingest the drug from their local water supplies.” Rokita noted that when a woman ingests mifepristone, whether via the drug in pill form or via mifepristone contaminating drinking water, the chemicals block the natural production of the hormone progesterone and erodes an unborn baby’s uterine environment. “The baby, in effect, is starved to death in the womb,” the Hoosier State A.G.’s office said.

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The strategy of selling killing based on it being limited to rare circumstances is used in every jurisdiction when debating the legalization of poisoning.

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (EPC) argues that once legal, the assisted killing law inevitably expands because it is discriminatory to allow doctors to kill one group of people while restricting doctors from killing another group of people with similar conditions. EPC has been vilified for our honesty.

The Globe and Mail published an opinion article on June 13 by Dr Konia Trouton titled: Why are the rules different for MAiD depending on what you have? Trouton is not only a euthanasia doctor but she is also a co-founder and past president of CAMAP (Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Practitioners) and she helped develop the curriculum for training doctors to poison (kill) their patients.

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“Living with a disease like ALS, you are supposed to have diminished dreams. I do not,” Harrell tells MIT Technology Review. “Any one of these things would be an absolute godsend of improvement. To have all of them, and many, many more, is truly revolutionary.”

Within the first 22.6 months after the device was implanted, Harrell had used it for more than 3,800 hours at home without any researchers present, the team reported today in the journal Nature Medicine. “He’s the first power user of a speech BCI,” says team member Sergey Stavisky, a neuroengineer at the University of California, Davis.

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Your water may be contaminated by abortion pills, officials warn.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) told the Daily Caller News Foundation that it is reviewing comments from 14 attorneys general urging the agency to classify mifepristone as a water contaminant.

“Pharmaceuticals, like Mifepristone, encompass a diverse group of chemicals, including prescription and over the counter drugs,” an EPA spokesperson told the DCNF. “EPA is currently reviewing comments submitted on its draft contaminant candidate list 6 (CCL 6), which lists pharmaceuticals as a group, and human health benchmarks for 374 individual pharmaceuticals that are approved by the FDA and may occur in surface and groundwaters and/or treated drinking water.”

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Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that died in the deep, let nature call, tossed a galactic salad, and became interstellar voyeurs.

First, there’s a whale necropolis under the sea that is packed with ancient carcasses and teeming with new species. Then: a bygone world preserved in poop, the fruits of the universe’s labor, and a zoom lens for distant planets.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

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The administrative state orchestrated a calculation during the global pandemic, utilizing specific diagnostic infrastructure to drive a nationwide enforcement regime. Anthony Fauci, acting as the primary architect of the federal response via the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), deployed hyper-amplified diagnostic parameters to mandate unprecedented economic and societal lockouts. This strategic mobilization substituted clinical confirmation with automated data collection, forcing compliance and establishing a blueprint for institutional control.

Anthony Fauci directed a command-and-control apparatus that dismantled localized medical autonomy and enforced absolute policy adherence across federal and corporate sectors. By shifting the state response from optional guidance to rigid containment directives, the public health leadership created an operational environment where alternate medical strategies faced immediate institutional suppression. Federal executive powers restricted public assembly, disrupted small commerce, and penalized individual resistance, utilizing public health agencies as an enforcement arm.

The administrative architecture penalized non-compliance by design. State governors and municipal authorities received direct allocations of emergency funding tied explicitly to the execution of federal mitigation protocols. This structural mechanism transformed local health networks into branches of a centralized command structure, ensuring that internal dissent from independent medical practitioners encountered professional decertification and systemic exclusion.

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(LifeSiteNews) – America First Legal (AFL) accused Chicago Public Schools (CPS), San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), and Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) of “socially transitioning” gender-confused students without the knowledge or consent of their parents in new complaints filed with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).

The New York Post reported that the group maintains all three districts let students change the names and genders they use at school without parental involvement or notification, plus lets male students who “identify” as girls participate in female-specific athletics and use female lockers and restrooms.

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In the summer of 2021, Beth Cameron, a biodefense expert on President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, sprinted to review the classified intelligence on the origins of COVID-19 by a 90-day deadline.

The issue was sensitive: The Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab complex at the pandemic’s epicenter, had conducted research that engineered novel coronaviruses with support from the U.S. government, namely, Anthony Fauci’s longtime institute at the National Institutes of Health. But prominent virologists in Fauci’s orbit had persuaded the corporate press that any suggestion of a connection between the pandemic and the Wuhan lab amounted to a conspiracy theory.

Biden had ordered a 90-day review of the intelligence that spring after a conflicted World Health Organization report failed to turn up credible answers.

Cameron called Fauci into a secure room on the White House campus that June, but not for questioning, declassified documents show. Instead Cameron invited him to the White House for a classified briefing with Maher Bitar, the special assistant to the president for intelligence.

“I would like to invite you to sit with us directly,” she wrote to Fauci in a newly released June 21, 2021 email. “We and Maher stand ready to assist and appreciate greatly your time and leadership.”

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Gurugram, India — When Nitin Sharma developed a high fever in May, dengue was the last thing on his mind.

The monsoon was still weeks away. Like many Indians, the 32-year-old software engineer from Gurugram, a business district outside New Delhi, had grown up believing dengue was a disease that arrived with the rains and disappeared once the monsoon season ended.

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A preprint describing genetically edited human embryos is raising concerns among scientists that the U.S. is becoming more accepting of using gene editing to enhance embryos.

“The cat’s out of the bag,” says Alexis Komor, deputy director of the Sanford Stem Cell Innovation Center at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the new finding.

A team of researchers, led by senior author and Columbia University cell biology researcher Dieter Egli, used base editing—a form of gene editing that involves small cuts to a single strand of DNA—to edit two genomic sites in human zygotes, or embryos at the single-cell stage, that correspond to PCSK9, a gene that regulates cholesterol, and HBG1 and HBG2, two genes that are responsible for the fetal form of the oxygen-carrying protein hemoglobin. The genes were chosen because they were well-studied, not for potential therapeutic purposes, the investigators wrote in the preprint. The experiment was first reported by the New York Times.

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Students for Life of America (SFLA) President Kristan Hawkins praised the 14 State Attorneys General who signed onto a letter sent to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) led by Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway.

The letter adds new voices to a growing coalition, built by SFLA, calling for accountability and information about the extent of abortion water pollution, permitted by negligent FDA polices and the failure of the Trump Administration to enforce the Comstock Act that says abortifacients cannot be delivered in the mail.

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Two scientists at a U.S. government lab were charged with smuggling vials of deactivated mpox virus into the country from Africa and lying about it during interviews with investigators at a Michigan airport, authorities said Tuesday.

A criminal complaint was unsealed in federal court in Detroit against Vincent Munster, who is chief of the virus ecology section at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, and Claude Kwe, who works with him.

Munster and Kwe were stopped at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in January after a flight from Paris and nine days in the Republic of Congo. An outbreak of the mpox disease has been linked to more than 2,000 deaths in Congo, a vast region in central Africa, though a two-year outbreak was declared over in April.

A criminal complaint was unsealed in federal court in Detroit against Vincent Munster, who is chief of the virus ecology section at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

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At least 282 confirmed cases of Ebola have now been reported in Congo’s ongoing outbreak as authorities in Brazil said they were looking into two suspected cases.

The two patients who recently arrived in Brazil from Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where the outbreak is ongoing, exhibited symptoms such as fever and chills.

The first patient is a Belgian traveller who came from Uganda to Rio de Janeiro. The Evandro Chagas National Institute of Infectious Diseases, of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), administered initial testing, which came back positive only for malaria. The patient remains isolated and the people who had contact with him are being monitored, according to health officials.

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A suspected Ebola case has sparked concern in Austria amid fears the deadly disease may have already spread to Europe. Health officials in Austria said the patient became ill shortly after returning from Uganda, where they are believed to have contracted the newly identified Bundibugyo strain.

It comes as the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo is hampering the Ebola outbreak response. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Ituri province in the east of the country was at the centre of a “catastrophic collision of disease and conflict”. In a statement posted on X, Tedros said the WHO could not “build community trust or isolate the sick while bombs are falling”.

Texas A&M Scientists have developed a nasal spray that reduces inflammation in the brain. The spray is being heralded as a potential effective treatment for dementia and Alzheimer’s patients. Research leader Dr. Ashok Shetty said, “Brain age-related diseases like dementia are a major health concern worldwide. What we’re showing is brain aging can be reversed, to help people stay mentally sharp, socially engaged and free from age-related decline.”

Go Deeper

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Nearly every animal species, including humans, has blood cells. But blood is not the same across the animal kingdom. Different species have evolved different types of blood and immune cells, reflecting millions of years of adaptation against infection and disease.

Scientists already understand a great deal about the makeup and function of blood cells in humans and mice thanks to advances in hematology and immunology. What has remained unclear is how these cells first appeared and evolved over time. To answer those questions, researchers at Kyoto University set out to trace the origins and diversification of blood cells across the animal world.

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China just launched fake human embryos to its space station for a new research mission

China’s artificial embryos are part of an experiment to learn more about how human pregnancies could develop under microgravity conditions

Science Photo Library–ZEPHYR/Getty Images

A clutch of artificial human embryos on China’s Tiangong space station could help researchers better understand whether human pregnancies in space are possible and safe.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences says the experiment marks the first study on human artificial embryos in space. The artificial embryos are actually structures derived from stem cells, and they mimic how embryos form during the early days of pregnancy. These structures wouldn’t be able to develop into humans even if they were implanted into a uterus. Researchers originally conceived these artificial embryolike structures as a model to study the earliest moments of development because of widespread international rules aimed at restricting research on real human embryos that are older than two weeks after fertilization.

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The wind picks up dust from the unpaved road one afternoon in December as Jack van Honk turns into a ramshackle neighborhood in Lambert’s Bay, on the west coast of South Africa. A stocky woman in a red patterned sundress steps out of a small home painted palest sea green, her ochre-dirt yard crowded with potted plants, many medicinal. She smiles broadly, deep wrinkles creasing a face that is cherubic and yet careworn beyond her 47 years. “Doctor! I missed you,” she beams, her husky voice barely more than a hoarse whisper.

Maria carries a rare genetic mutation that is almost unknown outside of southern Africa. Its effects have been to calcify a part of the brain called the basolateral amygdala, and to thicken and scar the vocal cords. A friend of Maria with the same condition lives several hours inland, and sometimes they meet when van Honk brings them to Cape Town for brain scans and other tests. “It helps to know I’m not alone,” Maria says.

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China has launched a national programme that will assign every humanoid robot manufactured in the country a unique digital identity code, effectively a citizen ID, but for bipedal machines (those that can balance and walk/run on two legs).

The initiative, called the Humanoid Full Lifecycle Management Service Platform, was announced on Friday. It is led by the Humanoid Robotics and Embodied Intelligence Standardization committee, which is under China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (via South China Morning Post).

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Older adults who cut back on dietary fat or reduced the amount of animal-based protein they consumed showed signs of becoming biologically younger, according to new research from the University of Sydney.

The study, published in Aging Cell, found that adults between the ages of 65 and 75 experienced reductions in their estimated ‘biological age’ after following specific diets for just four weeks. Researchers say the findings suggest dietary changes later in life may quickly improve markers linked to aging and overall health.

The research was led by Dr. Caitlin Andrews from the University of Sydney’s School of Life and Environmental Sciences. While the results are promising, the scientists emphasized that the study provides only an early indication rather than definitive proof that diet can reverse aging. They say larger and longer studies are needed to determine whether these biological changes lower disease risk over time and whether the same effects occur in other age groups.