Health insurance premiums in the U.S. significantly increased between 1999 and 2024, outpacing the rate of worker earnings by three times, according to our newly published research in the journal JAMA Network Open.
Premiums can rise if the costs of the medical services they cover increase. Using consumer price indices for the main components of medical care – such as services provided in clinics and hospitals as well as administrative expenses – based on federal data and data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, we found that the cost of hospital services increased the most, while the cost of physician services and prescription drugs rose more slowly.
Some of the premium increases can be attributed to an increase in hospital outpatient visits and coverage of GLP-1 drugs. But research, including our own, suggests that premiums have rapidly escalated mostly because health system consolidation – when hospitals and other health care entities merge – has led hospitals to raise prices well above their costs.
On a 6 to 1 vote, the Westerly School Committee voted
down an Athletic Eligibility Policy that would be in violation
of state law and discriminate against transgender, gender diverse, and
transitioning students. School Committee member Lori Wycall had
requested that Westerly Superintendent present a policy for consideration that
would mandate that “boys stay in boys sports teams and stay on girls sports
teams.”
Asked for his professional opinion, the School Committee
Attorney, William Nardone, was unequivocal in his opposition: “…one
of my roles in this position, probably my most important role, is to keep you
out of trouble as opposed to getting you out once you get yourselves in. This
is a perfect example of my opportunity to attempt to keep you from getting into
some trouble.”
The effort to discriminate against transgender, gender
diverse, and transitioning students seems to be led by a small group of
bigoted Christian Nationalists, with the support of Committee member Wycall, who seems desperate to pass something that will somehow fit into Rhode
Island’s strong laws protecting the rights of LGBTQIA+ students, while also
discriminating against them. Unfortunately for Committee member Wycall, there is
no squaring this circle. Any effort to pass and enforce such a policy would be
bigoted, discriminatory, and against the law.
The Westerly School Committee has been wrestling with this
right-wing manufactured “controversy” for months, even years. Even after the
policy’s definitive rejection in last night’s meeting, proponents of
discrimination promised to keep taking shots at it.
People who treat others with compassion often feel more at
ease themselves. This is the key finding of a new study by Majlinda Zhuniq, Dr.
Friedericke Winter, and Professor Corina Aguilar-Raab from the University of
Mannheim. Their study was recently published in
the journal Scientific Reports.
Key findings from the meta-analysis
While the link between self-compassion and well-being is
well established, this effect has hardly been researched with respect to
compassion for others.
In a meta-analysis, the research team analyzed data from
more than 40 individual studies.
The results showed that people who empathize with others,
support them, or want to help them report greater overall life
satisfaction, experience more joy, and see more meaning in life.
On
average, these people's psychological well-being was higher. The link between
compassion and a reduction in negative feelings, such as stress or sadness, was
weaker. However, slight positive trends could also be seen in this respect.
The above video still of Claudio Manuel Neves Valente was taken from Alamo Rent a Car on November 17, 2025. This shows Valente picking up the car.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha,
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley, the Providence Police
Department, the Rhode Island State Police, the Boston
Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and
the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Rhode Island are
today announcing the death of Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, the
individual responsible for the murders of two students during a mass shooting
at Brown University on Saturday, December 13, 2025.
“Our singular goal was to obtain justice for the victims of
this senseless act, and tonight our community can begin to heal as we close the
book on this unimaginable tragedy,” said Attorney General Neronha.
“While we’ll
never be able to prosecute this individual, I hope this result begins to
provide some small measure of closure for the victims and their families. I
want to extend enormous gratitude to all of our law enforcement partners for
their outstanding work in this case. Since Saturday, these men and women have
worked around the clock to achieve justice for the victims and restore a sense
of peace to Rhode Islanders.”
On December 18, 2025, a Rhode Island state court, based on
an affidavit from a Providence Police Detective, issued a state arrest warrant
for Neves Valente, charging him with two counts of murder and 23 felony counts
of assault and felony firearms offenses.
Earlier this evening, law enforcement located Neves Valente
at a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire. After obtaining a federal search
warrant for the unit, authorities entered and found Neves Valente deceased from
a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Neves Valente (age 48) was born in Torres Novas, Santarem,
Portugal, and was a Legal Permanent Resident of the United States. Neves
Valente arrived in the United States in August 2000 as an F-1 student at Brown
University and subsequently obtained U.S. lawful permanent residency in April
2017. While at Brown University, he enrolled in a doctoral program but later
withdrew from the university.
Full details of the investigation and subsequent
identification of Neves Valente can be found
in this affidavit.
For months, the Trump administration has been accusing its political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence.
Donald Trump branded one foe who did so “deceitful and potentially criminal.” He called another “CROOKED” on Truth Social and pushed the attorney general to take action.
But years earlier, Trump did the very thing he’s accusing his enemies of, records show.
In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence.
In reality, Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. Instead, the two houses, which are next to his historic Mar-a-Lago estate, were used as investment properties and rented out, according to contemporaneous news accounts and an interview with his longtime real estate agent — exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud.
At the time of the purchases, Trump’s local real estate agent told the Miami Herald that the businessman had “hired an expensive New York design firm” to “dress them up to the nines and lease them out annually.” In an interview, Shirley Wyner, the late real estate agent’s wife and business partner who was herself later the rental agent for the two properties, told ProPublica: “They were rentals from the beginning.” Wyner, who has worked with the Trump family for years, added: “President Trump never lived there.”
Mortgage law experts who reviewed the records for ProPublica were struck by the irony of Trump’s dual mortgages. They said claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time, as Trump did, is often legal and rarely prosecuted. But Trump’s two loans, they said, exceed the low bar the Trump administration itself has set for mortgage fraud.
At least four Supreme Court justices recently signaled their
apparent agreement with Donald Trump’s effort to roll back the Fourteenth
Amendment’s definition of American citizenship.
The case at issue, Trump v. Barbara, involves
birthright citizenship — the principle that you’re a citizen of the country
where you were born.
In the United States, birthright citizenship was written
into the Constitution after the Civil War. Following the end of slavery, the
amendment confirmed that the fundamental rights of citizenship do not depend on
white ancestry, but belong to everyone born in this country.
On Day One of his presidency, Trump issued an Executive
Order to overthrow that principle. He ordered that babies born in the
U.S. of undocumented immigrants should not be considered citizens.
If Trump’s order were deemed legal, he would have the power
to annul the citizenship of tens of millions of Americans, deny their right to
vote and other legal entitlements, and even deport them. Trump’s endorsement of
racial targeting in ICE arrests confirms that, in revoking citizenship, he
would focus on people of color.
The first judge to hear a challenge to Trump’s order,
federal Judge John Coughenour, concluded it was plainly illegal. “I have
difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that
this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.”
“I’ve been on the bench for over four decades,” he
continued. “I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as
clear as this one. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.”
Coughenour is no “radical liberal.” He was appointed to the
bench by conservative Republican President Ronald Reagan. But any reasonable
judge would reach the same conclusion — and many did, including judges of the
Ninth and First Circuits.
Disturbingly, however, the Supreme Court may validate this
“blatantly unconstitutional order.” Under Supreme Court rules, at least four
justices must vote to take up a lower court ruling. So at least four decided
Trump’s incredible claims were sound enough to put on the Supreme Court docket.
The decision is unsupportable. The Fourteenth Amendment
begins with this plain statement: “All persons born or naturalized in
the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the
United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Trump’s lawyers assert that children born in the United
States of undocumented immigrants aren’t citizens because they aren’t subject
to U.S. jurisdiction. That’s nonsense — jurisdiction has nothing to do with
whether someone is legally in the United States.
“Jurisdiction” refers
to the lawful authority a government exercises over individuals within its
territory. If someone is not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, that means U.S. laws
don’t apply to them.
When Donald Trump’s administration abruptly canceled federal subscriptions to Springer Nature journals this summer, government researchers across the country suddenly lost access to some of the most influential publications in science. News reports framed the decision as part of a broader narrative about an attack on science — and indeed, journal access is essential to researchers.
What the uproar really revealed, however, was something subtler but just as corrosive: the hidden economics of how science gets published and accessed.
Most Americans don’t realize they are paying not once, not twice, but at least three times for the same body of research.
Inside universities, this academic triple tax, as I think of it, is so normalized that faculty barely notice it, and they feel paralyzed to do anything about it. It’s woven into the daily routines of professors, grant writers, peer reviewers, and librarians. Yet it quietly drains billions of public dollars each year, enriching a handful of for-profit publishers while eroding the budgets of the very institutions that produce the research.
Restaurants and dinner hosts may be able to create more
comfortable dining experiences by ensuring that everyone at the table is served
at the same time, according to a new study.
Most people recognize the familiar moment at a restaurant or
dinner party when their meal arrives, yet they hesitate to begin eating because
others are still waiting. This long-standing custom was the focus of new
research co-authored by Bayes Business School. The findings show that
individuals tend to worry more about breaking this norm themselves than about
others doing so.
The study, conducted by Irene Scopelliti, Professor of
Marketing and Behavioural Science, and Janina Steinmetz, Professor of Marketing
at Bayes, together with Dr Anna Paley from the Tilburg School of Economics and
Management, explored how people judge their own behavior compared with what
they expect from others in the same situation. Their work drew on six separate
experiments.
Participants were asked to imagine sharing a meal with a
friend. In some scenarios, they received their food first; in others, they
watched their dining partner receive a meal before them. Those who were served
first rated, on a numerical scale, how long they felt they should wait or
whether they should start eating. Those who were still waiting evaluated what
they believed their companion ought to do.
The results showed a clear gap between how people judge
themselves and how they judge others. Individuals served first thought they
should wait significantly longer than their dining partners actually expected
them to.
A new poll shows US voters’ approval of President Donald
Trump’s handling of the economy has hit an all-time low, even as the president
and his officials insist the economy is the best in the world.
The latest Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs
Research poll released Thursday found that only 31% of voters approve of Trump’s
handling of the economy, the lowest figure in that survey throughout either of
his two terms in office. Overall, 68% of voters said that the current state of
the economy was “poor.”
What’s more, Trump’s approval rating on the economy among
Republican voters now stands at just 69%, a strikingly low figure for a
president who has consistently commanded loyalty from the GOP base.
Despite the grim numbers, the president and his
administration have continued to say that the US is now in the middle of an
economic boom.
During a Thursday morning interview on CNBC,
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that the US now has “the greatest $30
trillion economy in the world.”
“We are doing great,” Lutnick said. “Nothing bad is
happening. Greatness is happening. We grew at 4% GDP! Come on!”
Lutnick’s message echoes the one Trump delivered earlier
this week during a rally in Pennsylvania, where he
said that voters’ concerns about being able to afford basics such as groceries,
electricity, and healthcare were
a “hoax” concocted by Democrats.
“Prices are coming down very substantially,” Trump falsely
claimed during his speech. “But they have a new word. You know, they always
have a hoax. The new word is affordability.”
Active shootings represent a very small percentage of on-campus university violence.
But among those that do happen, there are patterns. And as law enforcement officials continue to investigate the Dec. 13, 2025, Brown University shooting, similarities can be seen with other active shooter cases on college campuses that scholar James Densley has studied. “They tend to happen inside a classroom, and there tends to be multiple victims,” Densley explains.
The Department of Education in Rhode Island, where Brown University is located, said on Dec. 16 that it is urging local elementary and secondary schools to review safety protocols.
Amy Lieberman, the education editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Densley about how schools have been given what he describes as an “impossible mandate” to try to prevent shootings.
What is the overall trajectory of school shootings over the past few years?
K-12 school shootings appear to be trending downward, at least in the past two years. But we actually saw the largest jumps in this type of violence in the three to five years leading up to 2024, which trends closely with the broader rise in homicide and violent crime we saw in the pandemic era.
In 2025, there have been 230 school shooting incidents in the U.S. – still a staggeringly high number. This compares with 336 school shootings in 2024, 352 in 2023, 308 in 2022, and 257 in 2021.
How this relates to an increase in schools trying to institute security measures to prevent shootings is an open question. But it’s true that many schools are experimenting with certain solutions, like cameras, drones, AI threat detection, weapons scanners, panic apps and facial recognition, even if there is only weak or emerging evidence about how well they work.
Schools are treated as the front line, because the larger, structural solutions are too difficult to confront. It is much easier to blame schools after a tragedy than to actually address firearm access, grievance pathways – meaning how a person becomes a school shooter – and the other societal problems that are creating these tragedies.
Most Americans are sick of plastic
use, but manufacturers continue to push the product on us. This holiday
season, is it possible to have a plastic-free celebration?
There’s no substitute for systemic policy change to regulate
plastic use, but individual actions on a mass scale can have an impact. They
can also be a dinner table conversation, potentially spurring cultural shifts
and inspiring local activism.
“None of us voted for more plastic,” says
Judith Enck, founder and president of Beyond
Plastics. Enck, who served as regional administrator at the Environmental
Protection Agency in 2009, adds that “the reason we have so much plastic is
because there is a glut of fracked
gas on the market.”
Enck says it’s entirely possible to have a plastic-free
holiday season. She suggests forgoing disposable dinnerware for your Christmas,
Hannukah, or Kwanzaa meal. “You can rent glassware and plates and beautiful
reusable tablecloths and napkins from local vendors,” she says.
(RNS) — Timothy Snyder, a historian of the
Holocaust and Eastern European tyranny, has a tip for dealing with
authoritarianism: “Don’t obey in advance.”
So, when the university that granted me my doctorate and
educated four generations of my family was
asked by the Trump administration in July for lists of Jewish faculty
members, I held my breath. Would I be able to continue to be proud of the
University of Pennsylvania, the place I learned so much from?
In the past year, universities have varied widely in their
responses to demands from the Trump administration to fall into line on ridding
their campuses of wokeness and antisemitism. Columbia
University (my undergraduate alma mater) settled with the
administration, paying $21 million in return for restoring its federal research
grants.
It’s hard to see how cutting basic science research will help reduce
antisemitism. It will likely only cause Jews’ presence at a university to be
seen as somehow disruptive. (See the recent
arguments that women ruined the workplace.)
Other universities have variously complied with
administration demands or resisted, but a few, such as Barnard College
of Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, acquiesced
and shared personal cellphone numbers of Jewish faculty. (Penn
refused, and is now being sued by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission.) Nara Milanich, a Barnard history professor, said it
reminded her of 1930s Italy, when lists of Jews were put together by the local
government. “We’ve seen this movie before, and it ends with yellow stars,” she
said.
It also troubled Milanich that the government appeared to be
“fishing” for reports of antisemitism: According to the Forward,
the University of California, Berkeley said it had provided the names of 160
individuals involved in cases of antisemitism. “Evidently, they don’t
have sufficient people to file lawsuits, so they have to go shake the trees to
find people?” said Milanich.
Lists of Jews are never a good thing. Amanda Shanor, a
professor at the Wharton School and Penn’s law school, told
The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper: “The history of government
demands for lists of Jewish people is one of the most terrifying in world
history. I hope that students, faculty, and staff — Jewish and non-Jewish alike
— will tell their family and friends about the government’s demand for a list
of Penn’s Jews.”
Neuroscientists at the University of Cambridge report that
the human brain moves through five "major epochs" as it rewires
itself from early development to late old age.
Each stage reflects a different
way the brain supports thinking, learning, and behavior as we grow, mature, and
eventually experience age-related decline.
A team from Cambridge's MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences
Unit analyzed MRI diffusion scans from 3,802 individuals ranging from newborns
to 90 years old. These scans track the movement of water through brain tissue,
which helps researchers map the networks that link one region to another.
Their findings, published in Nature Communications,
show that the brain's structure progresses through five broad phases. Four key
"turning points" divide these phases, marking ages when the brain
undergoes meaningful reorganization.
Trump continues baffling attack on FEMA. Is it another distraction?
By Carl David Goette-Luciak
This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
A meeting that was supposed to chart the future of America’s disaster-response agency ended on Thursday before it could even begin.
The final report of a committee tasked by Donald Trump with reviewing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was scheduled to be presented and put to a vote Thursday afternoon. But shortly before 1 p.m., when the FEMA Review Council was scheduled to convene in Washington, a draft of the report was leaked to news outlets and the White House abruptly canceled the session.
The shakeup appeared to surprise even some of the review council’s own members, several of whom were still awaiting instructions outside the meeting’s planned location less than an hour before it was supposed to start, The Washington Post reported. Registered attendees only received notice of the meeting’s postponement after the event was scheduled to conclude. That announcement, a two-sentence email from the council’s designated federal officer, Patrick Ryan Powers, did not provide an explanation for the cancellation or a date for a rescheduled meeting.
The draft of the report signaled the review council’s plan to dramatically cut the agency even as climate change-fueled disasters increase, provoking swift condemnation from advocacy groups and emergency management experts. Critics panned the draft as a blueprint for weakening the nation’s primary emergency-response agency and shifting responsibility onto states unequipped and unprepared to manage crises alone.
Events, reports and analysis have converged this week to
underscore Donald Trump’s unique view of how the world should spin.
Beyond the fallout of defending U.S. strikes on suspected
drug boats, increasing threats of an undeclared war on Venezuela, the excesses
of a mass deportation campaign spiraling out of control, unending tariffs, and
flailing attempts to force Ukraine into a bad deal with Russia, we got a
new National
Security Strategy document that lays out Trump’s values as if they are
ours.
Together, they reflect the clear vision of an autocratic,
power-minded Trump who wants to dictate to Americans and the rest of the world
that they should forego human rights and democracy, recognize a U.S.
hemispheric dominance, and kowtow to us because of our national wealth, not our
ideals.
As
The New York Times concluded in an analysis of the strategic document,
“The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its
vast powers to make money” at the expense of support for dictators and caring
about those without wealth.
“Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a
global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing
migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing
them as sources of cash,” The Times analysis said.
The U.S. Supreme Court is currently reviewing a case to determine whether Donald Trump’s global tariffs are legal.
Until recently, tariffs rarely made headlines. Yet today, they play a major role in U.S. economic policy, affecting the prices of everything from groceriesto autosto holiday gifts, as well as the outlook for unemployment, inflation and even recession.
I’m an economist who studies trade policy, and I’ve found that many people have questions about tariffs. This primer explains what they are, what effects they have, and why governments impose them.
What are tariffs, and who pays them?
Tariffs are taxes on imports of goods, usually for purposes of protecting particular domestic industries from import competition. When an American business imports goods, U.S. Customs and Border Protection sends it a tariff bill that the company must pay before the merchandise can enter the country.
Because tariffs raise costs for U.S. importers, those companies usually pass the expense on to their customers by raising prices. Sometimes, importers choose to absorb part of the tariff’s cost so consumers don’t switch to more affordable competing products. However, firms with low profit margins may risk going out of business if they do that for very long. In general, the longer tariffs are in place, the more likely companies are to pass the costs on to customers.
On Saturday, December 6, soccer fans around the world found out where their favorite teams will be playing in the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Players and staff from 48 countries and territories will play 104 games across North America — and for the first time in history, Canada is hosting some of the games. Together, Toronto and Vancouver will host 13 matches.
In addition to the matches, 84 training sites and 178 practice fields will be spread across Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. Plus, tens of thousands of broadcasters from around the world will cover the games for their home countries.
Holding the games in three countries means that ease of crossing borders is a fundamental part of the World Cup going smoothly. Hundreds of thousands of players, staff, and fans will need to move across the U.S.-Mexico border and the Canada-U.S. border multiple times in order to attend the matches over the course of six weeks in June and July 2026. But already, months before the games begin, concerns are mounting over whether attendees will be able to enter the host countries at all.
The disintegration of Donald Trump’s mind—now obvious for
everyone to see—is metaphorical of the disintegration of our society. Unfitness
means that there is no one in charge of the government; there is no one home.
Rather, the appearance of someone being home makes him a prime
target for nefarious forces to do their mischief.
Sometimes the greatest threat to national security is
someone who can be leveraged and compromised—so as to parrot our enemies’
propaganda, to destroy American democracy from within, and to assist their rise
in global dominance.
One of these enemies is Vladimir Putin. Russian forces
launched 704 total missiles and drones against Ukraine overnight on December 5
to 6, 2025, heavily targeting railway and energy infrastructure in this proxy
U.S.-Russia war. The goal is to freeze our fellow pro-democracy Europeans, so
as to force them into submission as winter approaches.
The child victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes are
apparently not the only ones who’ve paid the price for Donald Trump’s long
relationship with that notorious pedophile.
Epstein’s “partying” with Trump has apparently also led to
thousands of civilian deaths abroad, the collapse of America’s credibility
around the world, and a serious threat to the future of democracy in Europe….
In Epstein’s emails, he boasts of offering to advise
Russia’s senior-most officials about how to manipulate Trump: “I think you
might suggest to putin that [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] lavrovcan
get insight on [Trump by] talking to me…”
Consider Trump’s secretive and beta-submissive behavior
toward Vladimir Putin, especially in Helsinki when he trashed our intelligence
agencies and sucked up to Putin, and more recently with his red carpet in
Alaska, and it’s impossible to ignore what this newest Epstein revelation
implies.
If Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine is a direct or indirect
result of things Trump did with Epstein, it’s naked treachery. Consider the
pattern:… the Russian military targets … are not accidents of war. They’re the
deliberate targeting of civilians, children, doctors, classrooms, apartment
buildings, homes, and hospitals….
And all of this—the horror of what’s happening in plain
sight that’s the clear result of Trump’s repeated and pathetic kowtowing to
Putin—appears, from the Epstein emails, that it may be getting so much worse
over the past 10 months because Putin took Epstein’s advice and threatened
Donald Trump with exposure.
We still don’t know what was said in that room in Helsinki
because Trump covered it up, making sure we’d never know. He ordered his
American interpreter to move away from his private conversation with Putin, and
afterward seized and destroyed her notes.
Similarly and more recently, in Alaska, Trump dismissed his
aides and rode with Putin privately in his car where they engaged in another
lengthy, secretive conversation.
That’s the behavior of a man with something to hide,
who’s terrified by some horrible secret….
Eager to show he isn't the total screw-up most non-MAGA feel he is, Patel tweeted this yesterday to claim credit for the capture and arrest of THE WRONG GUY. No thanks to Patel, his false statement interrupted the investigation for the real killer who, at this writing, is still on the loose.
Children will die if proposed changes to federal vaccine
policy take effect, doctors warned today during a joint press conference with
representatives from six leading health organizations.
Experts were responding to a vote by members of the Advisory
Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—all handpicked by Health and Human
Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—to
limit the use of hepatitis B vaccines in newborns, in spite of
evidence that the shots prevent
cancer and save lives.
“Children will
acquire hepatitis B and die as a result of these recommendations,”
said Aaron M. Milstone, MD, representing the American Academy of Pediatrics
(AAP). “My colleagues or I, not a committee member, will be the ones supporting
the parents of a dying child and trying to explain how they were let down and
lost a child from a preventable infection.”
The ACIP recommended vaccinating all healthy newborns
against hepatitis B at birth for 34 years, because mothers can pass the virus
to infants during delivery. That recommendation helped
to reduce the number of hepatitis B infections in children by 99%.
But last week, the ACIP voted to recommend a birth dose of
hepatitis B vaccine only for newborns whose mothers test positive for the virus or
whose infection status is unknown. Mothers who aren’t infected with hepatitis B
should discuss the risks and benefits with their health provider, the group
advised. Babies who aren’t vaccinated against hepatitis at birth should wait at
least 2 months for their first dose, the committee decided.
Experts note that blood tests aren’t always accurate,
producing “false negative” results about 5% of the time. About 90% of
infants exposed to hepatitis B at birth develop a chronic, incurable infection
that can lead to liver failure, liver cancer, and early death.
Babies and children also can be exposed after birth by
family members.
Research has shown that postponing an infected baby’s first
dose of hepatitis vaccine by 2 months could could
cause at least 1,400 preventable hepatitis B infections among
children, 300 additional cases of liver cancer, 480 preventable deaths, and
over $222 million in excess health care costs a year.
The Coast Guard demonstrates the correct, legal way to make ocean drug arrests
Human rights organization Amnesty International is cautioning critics of the Trump administration’s boat-bombing spree against getting bogged down in the precise details of each individual strike if it means losing sight of the bigger picture.
Daphne Eviatar, director for security and human rights for
Amnesty International USA, said that it would be a mistake to merely
condemn the Trump
administration for launching a double-tap strike aimed at killing
shipwrecked survivors of an initial attack, because the entire campaign of
bombing vessels based on the suspicion that they are carrying illegal narcotics
is unlawful.
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