Los Angeles County reports a rare handful of local dengue cases
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(LOS ANGELES) — While Los Angeles County is reporting three locally acquired cases of dengue this year — which is rare for the region — there have been at least 3,085 cases nationally of locally acquired virus so far this year, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
There has been about double the number of locally acquired dengue cases so far this year nationally compared to last year, according to the CDC. Puerto Rico currently makes up the bulk of those cases – with over 2,960 reported. The U.S. territory declared a public health emergency back in March.
“The City of Baldwin Park is aware of the recent cases of locally acquired dengue in our community. While the risk of transmission remains low, we must take this situation seriously and act proactively,” said Mayor Emmanuel J. Estrada.
Dengue viruses spread through mosquito bites. The most common symptom is a fever with aches and pains, nausea, vomiting and rash. Symptoms usually begin within two weeks after being bitten by an infected mosquito and last 2-7 days. Most people recover after about a week.
Locally acquired cases mean that the people infected have no history of traveling to an area where dengue normally spreads. Local dengue transmission is typically common in tropical and subtropical areas of the world – including Florida, and U.S. territories in the Caribbean.
Last year, there were only two locally acquired cases reported in the state of California, the first local cases in the state reported in over a decade, according to CDC data.
The CDC issued a health alert in June warning health care providers of an increased risk of dengue virus infection this year. Globally, new cases of dengue have been the highest on record, according to the CDC. The agency also noted that cases are likely to increase as global temperatures increase.
The best way to prevent dengue is to avoid mosquito bites, according to the CDC.
(NEW YORK) — A recall on apple juice due to potentially harmful levels of arsenic has expanded to include more brands sold at several additional retailers across the country.
The initial voluntary recall by Refresco Beverages was first announced in a class 2 enforcement report from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last month and included 9,535 cases of Great Value 100% Apple Juice sold at Walmart. On Monday, the recall was updated to a total of 133,500 cases of juice, which were sold at several stores in addition to Walmart, under varying brand names.
According to the FDA’s report, the recalled product “contains inorganic arsenic above action level set in guidance to industry.”
“The safety of consumers is always our top priority,” the Tampa, Florida-based Refresco Beverages said in a new statement on its website. “On August 23, 2024, out of an abundance of caution, we voluntarily initiated a recall of some select lots of 100% apple juice products produced using supplier provided concentrate when we became aware that previously manufactured product contained inorganic arsenic slightly above the FDA’s 10 ppb (parts per billion) action level as set by the FDA in June 2023 in the FDA Final Guidance to Industry on Action Level for Inorganic Arsenic in Apple Juice.”
“At this time there are no reported incidents caused by these products,” the statement continued. “We are working diligently to address the situation and encourage consumers to check the FDAs recall list … and use the information on their site to determine if they are in possession of products that fall within this proactive, voluntary recall.”
Apple juice recall expands to more brands, retailers
The newly expanded recall now includes juice that was sold at Aldi, BJ’s Wholesale Club, Market Basket, Walgreens and Weis Markets, under brands such as Nice! 100% Apple Juice and Clover Valley 100% Apple Juice, among others.
Click here for the full list of affected products from the FDA.
Originally, the Great Value brand apple juice sold at Walmart in 25 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia was the only brand recalled by Refresco Beverages.
Product details of recalled apple juice by store
The first wave of contaminated Great Value beverages in question were sold in six-packs of 8-ounce plastic bottles with the UPC code 0-78742-29655-5. The product had a “best if used by” date code of DEC2824 CT89-6.
All of the products were produced by Tampa, Florida-based Refresco Beverages US Inc.
Below, see details for the items included in the newly expanded recall.
Walmart
Recalled products sold at Walmart include Great Value 8-ounce Apple Juice in six-pack plastic bottles with “best if used by” dates of Dec. 26 and Dec. 27, 2024, and Great Value 96-ounce Apple Juice with “best by” dates of Dec. 26, Dec. 27 and Dec. 28, 2024.
The six-pack juice bottles were sold in stores in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Virginia. The 96-ounce containers were sold in Walmart stores in Indiana, Ohio, Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico and Virginia.
Aldi
Aldi is recalling Nature’s Nectar 64-ounce plastic bottles of 100% Apple Juice with “best by” dates of March 26 and 27, 2025. This product bears the UPC code 4099100036381 and was sold at Aldi stores in 16 states including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wisconsin, according to a press release from Aldi U.S.
Walgreens
Walgreens is recalling Nice! 100% Apple Juice 64-ounce bottles with a March 25, 2025, “best by” date. The products were sold in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Key Food
Key Food is recalling Urban Meadow 100% Apple Juice sold in 64-ounce bottles with a March 26, 2025, “best by” date. The products were sold in Pennsylvania stores.
BJ’s Wholesale Club
BJ’s Wholesale Club is recalling Wellsley Farms 100% Apple Juice 96-ounce bottles with a “best by” date of March 26, 2025. These products were sold in Florida, Massachusetts and New Jersey.
Dollar General
Dollar General is recalling Clover Valley 100% Apple Juice with a “best by” date of March 27, 2025. The product was sold at the discount retailer locations in Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, New York, Ohio and South Carolina.
Weis
Weis 100% Apple Juice 64-ounce bottles with a “sell by”‘ date of March 25, 2025, are also impacted by the expanded recall. The products were sold at stores in Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Market Basket
The supermarket chain is recalling Market Basket 100% Apple Juice from concentrate in 64-ounce plastic bottles with the “best by” date March 25, 2025. The impacted product was sold in Maine.
Lidl
Lidl is recalling Solevita 100% Apple Juice 64-ounce plastic bottles with the “best by” date March 27, 2025. This product was sold in Virginia.
Company responds to apple juice recalled over arsenic levels
In an earlier statement to ABC News when the recall was first initiated, a representative for Refresco said, “We are aware that certain lots of the 100% apple juice we previously manufactured contains inorganic arsenic slightly above the FDA’s 10 ppb (parts per billion) action level in the FDA Final Guidance to Industry on Action Level for Inorganic Arsenic in Apple Juice, which aims at reducing the dietary exposure of contaminants to as low as possible. As a result, impacted products are being voluntarily recalled.”
The statement continued, “At this time there are no reported complaints or incidents of illness caused by the product. Per the FDA, it is not possible to completely prevent arsenic from entering the food supply, yet exposure to high levels of inorganic arsenic can have adverse health effects.”
The representative added that “the safety of consumers and the satisfaction of our customers are our top priorities” and that the company is “working diligently to address the situation.”
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story was published on Aug. 26, 2024.
(NEW YORK) — With the recent pick of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, the environmental attorney’s views on vaccines have been thrust back into the spotlight.
Kennedy has been a prominent vaccine skeptic, arguing that more research of vaccines is needed, although he has claimed in interviews that he has “never been anti-vaccine.”
Vaccine researchers tell ABC News that his recent comments don’t align with his past campaigns and that, if confirmed, he could convince vaccine-hesitant parents to not vaccinate their children.
“He’s really not a vaccine skeptic; I’m a vaccine skeptic,” Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center, an attending physician in the division of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, told ABC News.
“Everybody who sits around the table at the FDA vaccine advisory committee is a vaccine skeptic, right? Show us the data, prove that this vaccine is safe, prove that it’s effective, because then and only then will we authorize it, or recommend authorization or licensure,” he said.
Offit argued that Kennedy is a “vaccine cynic,” adding, “He thinks that we’re not getting the right information, that there’s an unholy alliance between the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA with the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] to hide the real data, and he’s going to find the real data, which is utter nonsense.”
Claims that vaccines cause autism
Kennedy has previously claimed that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine — a myth that was born out of a now-debunked paper from the U.K. in 1998.
The fraudulent paper has since been discredited by health experts, retracted from the journal in which it was published, and its primary author, Andrew Wakefield, lost his medical license. More than a dozen high-quality studies have since found no evidence of a link between childhood vaccines and autism.
Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said he’s worried that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy has spilled over into hesitancy towards childhood vaccines.
There have been more measles outbreaks this year than last year and a five-fold increase in whooping cough cases this year from the year before, according to CDC data, which Hotez says is a sign that more parents may be increasingly vaccine-hesitant.
According to the CDC, there have been a total of 277 measles cases reported in 30 states in 2024 — more than four times the amount last year — with 16 outbreaks this year compared to four outbreaks in 2023. An estimated 96% of measles cases this year were not fully vaccinated. Additionally, whooping cough cases are at the highest levels this year since 2014, according to CDC data.
This comes as vaccinations among kindergarteners dipped in the 2023-2024 school year for the fourth year in a row – failing to meet the 95% threshold goal aimed to prevent a single infection from sparking an outbreak. The last time that threshold was met was pre-pandemic, during the 2019-2020 school year.
“Now you put someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s most prominent, well-known anti-vaccine activist at the top of the food chain, at the top of Health and Human Services,” Hotez said. “I don’t see how these things improve any. If anything, they could start to decline even further. …So, I worry about further erosion in the number of kids getting vaccinated in the U.S.”
Claims about the COVID-19 vaccine
Kennedy also spread vaccine misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic including claims that Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation were trying to profit off a COVID-19 vaccine.
During a December 2021 Louisiana House of Representatives meeting discussing a proposal to require schoolchildren to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, Kennedy falsely called the vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made.”
Health officials say COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective following clinical trials that involved tens of thousands of people, and have since helped save millions of lives.
Offit says he is worried that, as the head of the HHS, Kennedy would help select directors of the CDC, FDA and the National Institutes of Health who are not qualified, and could similarly espouse vaccine-skeptic views.
“My worry is that he is not going to pick technically competent people,” he said. “My worry is he’s going to have a role in selecting ideologues who are not well-educated about infectious diseases or vaccines, and maybe who lack government experience as well.”
Both Offit and Hotez said it will be important over the next four years for doctors to have conversations with vaccine-hesitant parents to educate them on the importance of vaccinating their children in case they are swayed by vaccine-skeptic rhetoric from Kennedy.
Offit said he is already getting emails from pediatricians about parents who are hesitant to vaccinate their children because of Kennedy’s past comments.
“Over the last few days, I’ve gotten emails from pediatricians, one particularly in Connecticut that comes to mind, where they’re saying, ‘Parents are coming in, and they’re saying they don’t want to get vaccines, in part because of what [Kennedy] said. What should we do?'” Offit said. “So, I think that’s where the rubber meets the road. It’s certainly a lot more work for clinicians than it used to be.”
(SILVER SPRING, Md.) — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday approved the first new drug to treat people with schizophrenia in more than 30 years.
Cobenfy, manufactured by Bristol Myers Squibb, combines two drugs, xanomeline and trospium chloride, and is taken as a twice-daily pill. In clinical trials, this combination helped manage symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thinking, which are common in schizophrenia.
“Schizophrenia is a leading cause of disability worldwide. It is a severe, chronic mental illness that is often damaging to a person’s quality of life,” Tiffany Farchione, M.D., director of the Division of Psychiatry, Office of Neuroscience in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in the approval announcement.
“This drug takes the first new approach to schizophrenia treatment in decades,” Farchione continued. “This approval offers a new alternative to the antipsychotic medications people with schizophrenia have previously been prescribed.”
Cobenfy offers new hope for people with schizophrenia, providing an innovative treatment option that could change how this condition is managed, according to Jelena Kunovac, MD, a board-certified psychiatrist and adjunct assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, in the Department of Psychiatry.
“We are overdue for a medication that targets schizophrenia with a different mechanism of action,” Kunovac told ABC News.
The first drugs for schizophrenia, including chlorpromazine and haloperidol – also known by the brand names Thorazine and Haldol, respectively – were introduced in the 1950s and revolutionized treatment of the disease. However, there have been very few new medications since then, with most subsequent FDA approvals being for variations of these older drugs.
Most schizophrenia medications, broadly known as antipsychotics, work by changing dopamine levels, a brain chemical that affects mood, motivation, and thinking, Kunovac explained. Cobenfy takes a different approach by adjusting acetylcholine, another brain chemical that aids memory, learning and attention, she said.
By focusing on acetylcholine instead of dopamine, Cobenfy may reduce schizophrenia symptoms while avoiding common side effects like weight gain, drowsiness and movement disorders, clinical trials suggest. These side effects often become so severe and unpleasant that, in some studies mirroring real-world challenges, many patients stopped treatment within 18 months of starting it.
In clinical trials, only 6% of patients stopped taking Cobenfy due to side effects, noted Dr. Samit Hirawat, chief medical officer at Bristol Myers Squibb. “That’s a significant improvement over the 20-30% seen with older antipsychotic drugs,” he added.
The most common side effects of Cobenfy are nausea, indigestion, constipation, vomiting, hypertension, abdominal pain, diarrhea, increased heart rate, dizziness and gastroesophageal reflux disease, according to the FDA announcement.
“It may prove advantageous to those who don’t tolerate what has been available,” Dr. Leslie Citrome, a clinical professor of psychiatry and expert in psychopharmacology at New York Medical College, told ABC News regarding Cobenfy. “This will provide a new approach that may work out quite nicely.”
Citrome emphasized that patients who have trouble tolerating the side effects of traditional schizophrenia medications may benefit most from Cobenfy, and that a different mechanism of action holds hope for those who have not responded adequately to existing treatments.
Schizophrenia is a mental health disorder that affects about 24 million people worldwide, or roughly one in 300 people, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). It often leads to significant challenges in daily functioning, work, and relationships, impacting both patients and their families.
The disorder typically begins in late adolescence or early adulthood and can lead to lifelong disability if not properly managed, according to the WHO, further highlighting the need for effective treatment options.
Following approval, doctors could start prescribing Cobenfy by the end of October, according to Adam Lenkowsky, executive vice president and chief commercialization officer at Bristol Myers Squibb.
Experts hope that the drug’s unique mechanism and reduced side effects will help set a new standard of care for schizophrenia patients. Studies for additional therapeutic uses, including the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and bipolar disorder, are also underway.
Jake Goodman, MD, MBA is a psychiatry resident physician and a member of the ABC News Medical Unit.
