News from the USA, United States of America

[Dakota15]

6/30, A Chat with Uma: From Foster Care to Harvard Neuroscientist: "The Choice to Live, Maternal Psychedelics & Post-Viral Chronic Illnesses with Dr. Ya’el Courtney“

"Covid was a horrible thing..but it drew public attention and scientific attention to post-viral conditions that affect the brain..”

““And the reason that was good is because there was this resurgence of interest in not only long Covid, but again, this idea of what happens when people get sick and don't get better. And resurgence of interest for a while at least translated to resurgence of funding, which meant that more labs started to ask these questions.”

“I'm particularly studying it from this idea that maybe it's because an autoimmune disease gets triggered.Others are studying it from other angles, but that's the angle that I'm taking. And so I'm studying this in long Covid. I'm studying this in post-treatment Lyme disease, and I have the freedom and flexibility in my lab to get actually samples from patients with other diseases that might be similar.There's another woman who's leading a small group on ME/CFS in my lab, so that's really her territory and really, really important work as well.”

 

[ahimsa]

Terminated NIH grants are being reinstated almost entirely in blue states

Posted in STAT+ (paywall) so I was not able to read it all but maybe someone out there can find a link without a paywall.

Background: The term "blue state" means a state where the majority of elected officials are from the Democratic party vs. the Republican party.

Here's a comment from a user who posted this link:

"It's not that Trump officials feel more lenient toward blue-state scientists. It's that blue-state Attorneys General fight back in court. Sometimes resistance works."

 

[ahimsa]

Trump's second presidency begins: evaluating effects on the US health system

The first hundred days of the second Trump administration was unprecedented, with the administration taking remarkably aggressive, often questionably legal actions across health policy. This article uses the Health Systems Performance Assessment Framework to identify key policies regarding resources, financing, governance, and service delivery and their impact on the cost, quality, access, and equity of the US health system. The evaluation is largely negative. The administration, in its very energetic first hundred days, has already undermined resources, financing, and in particular governance in areas as diverse as oversight of long-term care, scientific research, and vaccination policy. Administration rhetoric and budget proposals called for severe reductions in health care access and actions to terminate services for particular groups, such as immigrants or gender minorities. Many of the particular actions, such as mass layoffs of specialist scientific and regulatory staff, will be difficult to reverse.