CDC winds down emergency response to bird flu
The big picture: A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said the response was "deactivated to transition back to regular program activity" last Wednesday due to animal infections with the H5N1 strain declining and no human cases being reported since February.
CDC data shows 70 bird flu cases were reported in the U.S., but there are no known person-to-person exposures in the U.S. right now, eliminating the need for the virus' emergency declaration.
The agency will continue to monitor the situation and report data on the number of people monitored and tested for bird flu monthly.
Detections in animals will no longer be reported on the CDC's website, but can be found on the USDA's website.
State of play: There has only been one fatality from H5N1 in the U.S. since the CDC H5N1 Bird Flu Response was activated in April last year, which was reported earlier this year in Louisiana.
The highest concentration of cases on the West Coast in California and Washington, according to CDC data.
The most affected states have either ended or are winding down their responses.
The HHS spokesperson said in their email statement that although the current public health risk from H5N1 bird flu is low, the CDC will continue to monitor the situation and scale up activities as needed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
How Sleep Loss Rewires Your Brain for Food Cravings
You stayed up too late scrolling through your phone, answering emails, or watching just one more episode. The next morning, you feel groggy and irritable. That sugary pastry or greasy breakfast sandwich suddenly looks more appealing than your usual yogurt and berries. By the afternoon, chips or candy from the break room call your name. This isn't just about willpower. Your brain, short on rest, is nudging you toward quick, high-calorie fixes. There is a reason why this cycle repeats itself so predictably. Research shows that insufficient sleep disrupts hunger signals, weakens self-control, impairs glucose metabolism and increases your risk of weight gain. These changes can occur rapidly, even after a single night of poor sleep, and can become more harmful over time if left unaddressed. As a neurologist specializing in sleep science and its impact on health, I know that sleep deprivation affects millions. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one-third of U.S. adults regularly get less than seven hours of sleep per night. Nearly three-quarters of adolescents fall short of the recommended eight to 10 hours of sleep during the school week. While anyone can suffer from sleep loss, essential workers and first responders, including nurses, firefighters and emergency personnel, are especially vulnerable due to night shifts and rotating schedules. These patterns disrupt the body's internal clock and are linked to increased cravings, poor eating habits, and elevated risks for obesity and metabolic disease. Fortunately, even a few nights of consistent, high-quality sleep can help rebalance key systems and start to reverse some of these effects. Your body regulates hunger through a hormonal feedback loop involving two key hormones. Ghrelin, produced primarily in the stomach, signals that you're hungry, while leptin, which is produced in the fat cells, tells your brain that you're full. Even one night of restricted sleep increases the release of ghrelin and decreases leptin, which leads to greater hunger and reduced satisfaction after eating. This shift is driven by changes in how the body regulates hunger and stress. Your brain becomes less responsive to fullness signals, while at the same time ramping up stress hormones that can increase cravings and appetite. These changes are not subtle. In controlled lab studies, healthy adults reported increased hunger and stronger cravings for calorie-dense foods after sleeping only four to five hours. The effect worsens with ongoing sleep deficits, which can lead to a chronically elevated appetite. Sleep loss changes how your brain evaluates food. Imaging studies show that after just one night of sleep deprivation, the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for decision-making and impulse control, has reduced activity. At the same time, reward-related areas such as the amygdala and the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain that drives motivation and reward-seeking, become more reactive to tempting food cues. In simple terms, your brain becomes more tempted by junk food and less capable of resisting it. Participants in sleep deprivation studies not only rated high-calorie foods as more desirable but were also more likely to choose them, regardless of how hungry they actually felt. Sleep is also critical for blood sugar control. When you're well-rested, your body efficiently uses insulin to move sugar out of your bloodstream and into your cells for energy. But even one night of partial sleep can reduce insulin sensitivity by up to 25%, leaving more sugar circulating in your blood. If your body can't process sugar effectively, it's more likely to convert it into fat. This contributes to weight gain, especially around the abdomen. Over time, poor sleep is associated with higher risk for Type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome, a group of health issues such as high blood pressure, belly fat and high blood sugar that raise the risk for heart disease and diabetes. On top of this, sleep loss raises cortisol, your body's main stress hormone. Elevated cortisol encourages fat storage, especially in the abdominal region, and can further disrupt appetite regulation. In a culture that glorifies hustle and late nights, sleep is often treated as optional. But your body doesn't see it that way. Sleep is not downtime. It is active and essential repair. It is when your brain recalibrates hunger and reward signals, your hormones reset, and your metabolism stabilizes. Just one or two nights of quality sleep can begin to undo the damage from prior sleep loss and restore your body's natural balance. So the next time you find yourself reaching for junk food after a short night, recognize that your biology is not failing you. It is reacting to stress and fatigue. The most effective way to restore balance isn't a crash diet or caffeine. It's sleep. Sleep is not a luxury. It is your most powerful tool for appetite control, energy regulation and long-term health. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The post How Sleep Loss Rewires Your Brain for Food Cravings appeared first on Katie Couric Media.
CNN
2 hours ago
- CNN
Major medical associations sue Kennedy, Trump administration health leaders for Covid-19 vaccine changes
Source: CNN Medical associations representing hundreds of thousands of doctors, medical professionals and scientists in the United States are suing the leaders of US health agencies for limiting who can get Covid-19 vaccines and for undermining overall vaccine confidence. The lawsuit, filed Monday in US District Court in Massachusetts, was brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, the American Public Health Association, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Massachusetts Public Health Association D/B/A the Massachusetts Public Health Alliance, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and an unnamed doctor who is pregnant and fears that she will be unable to get the Covid-19 vaccine. 'Our clients are not litigious organizations. They don't want to be in court, and certainly we do not like that we're in the position of having to sue the secretary of Health and Human Services, our nation's chief health officer. So this is a position that I don't think they want to be in, but it's necessary,' Richard Hughes, lead counsel for the plaintiffs, said at a news conference Monday, calling the lawsuit 'unprecedented.' The groups are suing US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and Matthew Buzzelli, chief of staff at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who is serving as its acting director. 'This step is not one we take lightly,' Dr. Susan Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said at the news conference Monday. 'It's not one we ever wanted to take at all, but we can no longer wait for government officials to sort this out. Pediatricians cannot stay silent as the system we rely on to support lifesaving vaccines is chiseled away, piece by piece.' HHS did not respond to CNN's request for comment about the lawsuit. In May, Kennedy took the highly unusual step of announcing in a video on social media that the Covid-19 vaccine would no longer be recommended for pregnant people and healthy children on the CDC's immunization schedule. Experts immediately warned that these changes could create new barriers to vaccines for those who want them, including confusion around who is eligible and higher costs for patients if insurance no longer covers them. Kennedy, who has a long history of anti-vaccine actions, also fired 17 members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and replaced them with seven new members, some of whom have raised questions about safety and efficacy of vaccines. The committee members serve as outside experts who help the CDC make informed decisions about vaccines. Last month, in the first meeting of the newly appointed committee, its chair said it would study well-established vaccines and guidelines, the childhood and adolescent immunization schedules and the vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox. The lawsuit argues that Kennedy and the Trump administration acted 'arbitrarily and capriciously' by changing the Covid-19 vaccine recommendations. The lawsuit asks for preliminary and permanent injunctions to enjoin, or legally prohibit, Kennedy's Covid vaccine recommendation changes and a declaratory judgment pronouncing the change in recommendations as unlawful. Dr. Sindhu Srinivas, president of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, said the decision about the Covid vaccine is dangerous for her patients. Pregnancy is on the CDC's list of conditions that can raise a person's risk of severe illness. 'The federal directive has no evidentiary basis in obstetrics or infectious disease,' Srinivas said. 'Maternal immunization is really the best way to reduce maternal, fetal and infant complications, particularly Covid-19 but also from other illnesses, other infections.' Kressly, of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said that the immunization system has been a cornerstone of US public health but that she and several members of her association have been alarmed by recent actions by HHS to alter the routine childhood immunization schedule. She said the moves are 'jeopardizing its success' and will make children and communities more vulnerable to infectious disease. Kressly cited the high number of measles cases this year as an example: There have been more measles cases in the US in 2025 than in any other year since the disease was declared eliminated a quarter-century ago. Anti-vaccine actions are not just rhetoric or politics, she said, they put people at risk. 'Every child's health is at stake,' Kressly said. Several doctors whose organizations are plaintiffs in the lawsuit said Kennedy's actions have led people to question the safety and effectiveness of all vaccines, not just the Covid-19 vaccine. Dr. Jason Goldman, president of the American College of Physicians, said some of his patients have been 'confused and scared.' 'This doesn't just impact one vaccine. It is impacting the entire adult and pediatric vaccine schedule and putting our patients at risk,' he said at Monday's news conference. Goldman added that changes to CDC guidance about the Covid-19 vaccine may mean his patients' insurance will not cover the cost of the shots, and without coverage, those vaccines would be too expensive, limiting access to good protection. Dr. Tina Tan, president of the Infectious Disease Society of America, said that some people may argue that Covid-19 is not a serious disease for children but that 'those of us who have dedicated our lives to caring for children know that is not the case.' 'Some people say that only a small number of children die from Covid, but the only acceptable number of dead children from Covid is zero, especially when we have the means to prevent their deaths and the vaccines that we have available are safe and very effective and can protect these children from getting severe disease and from dying,' Tan said at the news conference. 'It is really unconscionable to take away a parent's ability and choice to protect their children through vaccination.' CNN's Asuka Koda contributed to this report. Correction: A lawyer for the plaintiffs mischaracterized the anonymous doctor's situation; this story has been updated to reflect the change. See Full Web Article
Boston Globe
3 hours ago
- Boston Globe
US measles cases reach 33-year high as outbreaks spread
The nation surpassed infections reported in 2019, reaching the largest number of cases since 1992, when officials recorded more than 2,100 infections, according to data published Friday from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Outbreak Response Innovation (CORI). 'It's devastating,' said Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers, a national organization of state and local immunization officials. 'We worked so hard to eliminate the threat of measles and to keep it at bay.' Authorities said at least 155 people have been hospitalized and three people have died of measles-related complications this year. The dead include two otherwise healthy children in Texas and a man in New Mexico, all of whom were unvaccinated. In contrast, only three measles deaths were reported between 2001 and 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up About 92 percent of measles cases in 2025 were in people who were either unvaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown, according to the CDC. Advertisement Data from the CDC does not yet reflect the record as it is updated weekly on Wednesdays, while the Johns Hopkins' site validates data every weekday. The largest outbreak has been in West Texas, where officials have recorded more than 750 cases since late January and believe the true toll is much higher. Data shows that outbreak has slowed, but that it has spread to surrounding states. Advertisement Unrelated clusters of cases emerged elsewhere, usually originating with an unvaccinated person who traveled abroad. Measles was officially eliminated from the United States in 2000 with high vaccination coverage and rapid outbreak response. Cases still popped up periodically. But in recent years, large outbreaks with 50 or more cases have become more frequent, especially in close-knit communities with low vaccination coverage. Public health experts say the country is on track to lose the elimination status if there is continuous spread of linked measles cases for more than 12 months. 'It's a harbinger of things to come,' said Eric Ball, a pediatrician who heads the California chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. 'Once we see a resurgence of measles, we know that other diseases are going to come behind it.' Misinformation about the safety and effectiveness of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine fueled the 1,274 cases recorded in 2019, according to public health officials and researchers. The outbreaks that year were concentrated in ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in New York, highlighting the risks in tight-knit communities where vaccine distrust takes hold. Confidence in public health measures, especially vaccines, has fallen since then, and is sharply divided along political lines. The national rate for MMR vaccination among kindergartners was slightly above 95 percent in 2019, the level of community protection scientists say is needed to prevent measles outbreaks. But that rate is now under 93 percent and falling, according to the CDC. Even in states with high vaccination coverage, pockets of unvaccinated people tend to cluster together. Measles is so contagious that a person without immunity exposed to the virus is highly likely to be infected and to spread it days before they develop symptoms. Advertisement A recent study showed that if US vaccination rates continue to decline, the nation could face millions of cases over the next 25 years. A poll conducted in March by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation found that 79 percent of adults say parents should be required to have children vaccinated against preventable diseases such as measles, mumps, and rubella to attend school. Support was stronger among Democrats, 90 percent, than among Republicans, 68 percent. Five years after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, less than half the public says it has at least some confidence in federal health agencies to carry out core public health responsibilities, according to a poll conducted in April by the health care think tank KFF. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime antivaccine activist who ascended to be the top US health official, has offered mixed messages about measles and the vaccine to prevent it. He initially downplayed the seriousness of the Texas outbreak after the first child died, saying: 'We have measles outbreaks every year.' He accompanied his calls for vaccination with caveats, raising concerns about the shots that public health experts called unfounded. Nola Jean Ernest, a pediatrician in rural southeastern Alabama, said many of her patients trust others who share their political views more than her when it comes to vaccination. She now sees patients who vaccinated older children refuse to vaccinate their infants. 'I've had several conversations in the last few months where they will say, 'We still trust you, we just don't trust the vaccines,'' Ernest said recently. 'That really breaks my heart.' Advertisement In Texas, infections in late January spread quickly within Gaines County's Mennonite community, some of whom educate their children at home or at private schools without vaccine mandates. The county had among the lowest kindergarten MMR vaccination rates in Texas, about 82 percent, according to state immunization data. Public health officials said they faced challenges in controlling the outbreak because many people were not getting tested or vaccinated for measles. Antivaccine groups mobilized quickly on the ground. Many Mennonite families turned to a prominent antivaccine doctor who offered unproven alternative treatments. Kennedy praised that doctor and his methods in a visit to the region. Children's Health Defense, an antivaccine group founded by Kennedy, interviewed the parents of a 6-year-old girl who died of measles, blaming her death on medical error rather than vaccination status. The organization did not immediately return a request for comment. Eventually, 36 Texas counties reported measles cases. Young adults from El Paso who work in oil fields close to Gaines County were among those infected this spring. El Paso went from five cases to 53 in a month, said Hector Ocaranza, director of the city and county health authority. Ocaranza said his community was vulnerable because a growing number of young adults, listening to what they see and hear on social media, are not getting vaccinated. Lara Anton, a spokeswoman for the Texas Health Department, said last week that the reporting of new measles cases has slowed, crediting rising population immunity from infections and increased vaccination. But the outbreak is not over. Advertisement Transmission is continuing in Gaines County, as well as Lamar County, in northeast Texas bordering Oklahoma, according to health department data. In Chihuahua, Mexico, which borders Texas and New Mexico, a child who visited Texas in February started a large measles outbreak that now exceeds 2,400 cases and eight deaths as of last week, according to data from the Pan American Health Organization. Measles outbreaks require vast personnel, time, dollars, and messaging, public health experts say. The 2019 outbreak cost New York City $8.4 million with 550 staff involved in the response, according to a 2020 report in the New England Journal of Medicine. Funding for state and local public health agencies, including immunization programs, has been slashed after increasing during the pandemic. Public health workers have been laid off because of widespread budget cuts across the federal health agencies. Because of the decreased funding, Texas had to pull resources and staff from other parts of its health department to respond to the outbreak, David Sugerman, a senior CDC scientist, told a committee of agency vaccine advisers in April. In Dallas, which has had one measles case this year, health officials had to lay off 16 immunization staff because of federal cuts, said Philip Huang, director of the county's health and human services department. 'The fact that this is occurring at the same time that we are seeing more measles cases in Texas than we have seen in more than 30 years makes absolutely no sense,' Huang said. Related : Related :
