Surgeon general warns of link between alcohol consumption and cancer risk
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(NEW YORK) — The U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on Friday warning of a link between alcohol consumption and cancer risk.
Alcohol consumption is the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States, after tobacco and obesity, according to the Surgeon General’s advisory.
For some cancers, including breast, mouth, and throat cancers, the risk of developing cancer may increase with one or fewer drinks per day, the advisory states.
Despite a growing body of evidence, fewer than half of Americans recognize alcohol consumption as a risk factor for cancer, according to the advisory.
A person’s risk of developing cancer due to alcohol consumption is also determined by other factors, including biological, economic, environmental and social, the advisory says.
“Alcohol is a well-established, preventable cause of cancer responsible for about 100,000 cases of cancer and 20,000 cancer deaths annually in the United States – greater than the 13,500 alcohol-associated traffic crash fatalities per year in the U.S. – yet the majority of Americans are unaware of this risk,” U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said in a statement. “This Advisory lays out steps we can all take to increase awareness of alcohol’s cancer risk and minimize harm.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
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(WASHINGTON) — With e-cigarettes and flavored vapes booming in popularity, the Supreme Court on Monday will examine whether the Food and Drug Administration unlawfully blocked the marketing and sale of more than a million new sweet and candy-flavored nicotine products in recent years.
The case comes as kid-friendly flavors, such as fruit, candy, mint, menthol and desserts, which are not approved by the FDA and are on the market illegally, have been fueling an explosion in retail sales of e-cigarettes.
While vaping among youth is declining, more than 1.6 million children use the products, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nearly 90% of them consume illicit flavored brands.
Two manufacturers of flavored nicotine-laced e-liquids such as “Jimmy the Juice Man Peachy Strawberry” and “Iced Pineapple Express” sued the FDA after their product applications were rejected, alleging regulators imposed unclear and unreasonable requirements to win approval.
Triton Distribution and Vapetasia acknowledged that their products may appeal to youth but insisted that a “growing body of scientific evidence” shows that “flavors are crucial to getting adult smokers to make the switch and stay away from combustible cigarettes.”
A federal appeals court sided with the companies last year, saying the agency had acted arbitrarily. If the Supreme Court upholds that ruling, it could clear the way for broader marketing and sale of flavored nicotine products.
Since 2009, when Congress passed legislation aimed at curbing tobacco use among young people, the government has almost universally denied tobacco company requests to sell flavored nicotine e-liquids, citing risks of addiction among minors.
Under federal law, companies must provide the FDA with reliable and robust evidence to show that the products would promote public health and that, on balance, the benefits to adult smokers would outweigh the risks of youth addiction.
The FDA has said the two companies in this case provided insufficient evidence that the benefits of their flavored e-products in helping tobacco smokers quit exceed the dangers of hooking children.
“If you ask adults who smoke if they were to switch to e-cigarettes what kind of flavors are they interested in, the majority of responses are tobacco flavor. If you ask kids, they like the fruit or candy flavor,” said Caroline Cecot, an administrative law expert at George Washington University Law School. “This was a big part of what the FDA was sort of thinking about. And we have this evidence.”
Nearly a quarter of high school students who use e-cigarettes consume illicit menthol-flavored varieties, according to the 2023 National Youth Tobacco Survey.
Josie Shapiro, the 2024 national youth ambassador for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids who testified before Congress on the dangers of nicotine addiction, said illicit flavored vapes hooked her at age 14.
“I think that by marketing any sort of flavored product as bubble gum or any of the genres of candy, it’s going to catch the eyes of children,” Shapiro said. “I’m still addicted, and I’m still trying to fight my addiction. Honestly, the FDA needs to regulate all flavored tobaccos to flavor ‘tobacco’ products and get them off the market.”
Public health experts have credited the FDA’s restrictions on flavored nicotine products with helping to drive down the number of teenagers who vape gradually from an “epidemic” level just five years ago.
The case, Food and Drug Administration v. Wages and White Lion Investments, LLC, will be decided before the end of the Supreme Court’s term in June 2025.
(NEW YORK) — Women are stocking up on birth control and asking for long-term contraception methods following President Donald Trump being elected to a second term last week, doctors say.
Searches for “birth control” and “Plan B” doubled between Nov. 2 and the two days after the election, with a notable spike the day after the election, Google Search data shows.
Doctors told ABC News that patients are worried that access to birth control and contraception might be limited after Trump takes office due to efforts made during his first term and comments made on the campaign trail.
Dr. Brittany Cline, an OB-GYN at Northwestern Medicine, in Chicago, said she has seen an increase in the number of appointments being made for contraceptive or birth control counseling as well as appointments for long-acting contraceptives being either inserted or replaced or exchanged.
“We have, in clinic, seen many patients coming in for their [intrauterine device] replacements, even this week,” she told ABC News. “On Monday, I used all of our intrauterine devices that the clinic had, and I think that this is going to continue over the next few months and even years down the line, as people try to take some control over their bodies.”
Cline said she also received a message from a patient this week requesting four years of her birth control prescription be sent to a pharmacy.
‘That’s something that I have not, you know, seen before. Usually, we supply, you know, 12 months, one year at a time,” she said. “We do know that as many medications, there is a shelf life, and so it would not be safe for me to prescribe four years’ worth of contraception to a patient because of the shelf life.”
Dr. Leslie Kantor, professor and chair of the Department of Urban Global Public Health at the Rutgers School of Public Health, in New Jersey, told ABC News that she has heard anecdotal reports of more traffic to websites that have information about birth control.
She said patients may be worried because of the federal contraceptive coverage guarantee. Under a provision of the Affordable Care Act, most private insurance plans must cover the full cost of most contraceptives, such as birth control, without making patients pay out-of-pocket costs.
If the incoming Trump administration allows employers and schools to use religious and moral exemptions to prevent coverage of contraceptives, as the White House did during Trump’s first term, this may lead to out-of-pocket costs that make contraceptives unaffordable to some, experts previously told ABC News.
The experts say patients may be concerned due to comments Trump made on the campaign trail suggesting he’s open to restricting contraceptives.
During an interview with Pittsburgh TV station KDKA-TV, Trump was asked if he supports any restrictions on a person’s right to contraceptives.
“Well, we’re looking at that and we’re going to have a policy on that very shortly,” Trump responded. “And I think it’s something you’ll find interesting and it’s another issue that’s very interesting.”
When asked to clarify if he was suggesting he was open to supporting some restrictions on contraceptives, “like the morning-after pill,” Trump dodged, saying. “Things really do have a lot to do with the states — and some states are going to have different policy than others.”
Some states have also taken it upon themselves to provide contraception access. In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer launched Take Control of Your Birth Control, a program to provide Michigan families access to free contraception including over-the-counter oral birth control pills, emergency contraception, condoms and family planning.
Both Cline and Kantor recommended that patients speak to their health care providers about the best birth control method for them as well as what options are available for them down the road.
“The advice that I would give to people right now is this is a great time to figure out the best birth control method for you, and you can do that in a variety of ways,” Kantor said. “It’s a terrific time to find an ongoing method of birth control that will work. …There’s no reason, however, to panic. Access to birth control is not going away tomorrow, and in fact, it’s not going away on the day that Trump becomes president.”
ABC News’ Lalee Ibssa, Soo Rin Kim and Kelsey Walsh contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — Named to lead the nation’s sprawling Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has big ideas for busting public health policy norms.
His Senate confirmation hearings — should they happen — will come with lots of questions about what Kennedy’s ideas would look like in practice.
His new role would mean relinquishing his outsider critic status and working from within a massive government system, leading an agency of 80,000 employees and dealing with everything from drug approvals to food recalls to the pandemic response.
So, what happens when his motto “Make America Healthy Again” collides with one of Washington’s largest government bureaucracies?
“He seems very clear on what it is he wants to get done. I’m just not sure he has an understanding of what it will take to get that done,” said one former senior HHS official who worked in the Biden administration.
Vaccines
On vaccines, President-elect Donald Trump’s picks of Johns Hopkins University professor Marty Makary to lead the Food and Drug Administration, former GOP Rep. Dave Weldon to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Janette Nesheiwat as surgeon general certainly add to Kennedy’s ability to make changes — if they’re confirmed by the Senate.
Both Makary and Weldon have raised questions about vaccine side effects, although they’ve also at times been supportive overall of the role vaccines play in public health. Kennedy himself has falsely claimed that vaccines cause autism, which has been debunked by numerous studies.
In their new positions, Makary, Weldon and Kennedy would have the power to select the experts who sit on important FDA and CDC advisory panels. Those panels play a key role in vaccine recommendations and authorizations for the general public, ultimately creating public health guidance for years to come.
“I think massively, in large part, the health care community would continue to move forward on vaccines as they do now, as they are considered to be one of the massive successes of public health in the last 100 years. And I don’t think that would change,” said Tom Inglesby, a former senior adviser to HHS and the White House during COVID-19 during the Biden administration.
“But what could change is potentially the cost of vaccines, the access to vaccines, guidance around new vaccines that might come online, and also confusion around public messaging from the federal government about safety and effectiveness of vaccines,” Inglesby said.
Food and nutrition
When it comes to chemicals and the food Americans consume, it’s less clear how Kennedy could make changes at HHS, as opposed to the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Agriculture, which have more oversight of areas such as water fluoridation, which Kennedy opposes, or school lunches, which he says he wants to make healthier. He has said, however, that he would gut the entire nutrition department at the FDA.
Kennedy could also move around funding — he’s said he’d deprioritize infectious disease research in favor of chronic illness research, for example. As avian flu cases continue to rise — raising concerns about a new pandemic — public health experts and former government officials have pushed back strongly on that idea.
But he has also called for restrictions on food additives, dyes and ultra-processed foods, something he could have direct influence over through the FDA, which determines safe thresholds for the “Acceptable Daily Intake” on substances.
Kennedy has generally received a more cautious welcome from the public health community regarding his focus on healthy food.
“There are some things here that are worth working on. You know, if we’re looking at the school lunch program in America, 30 million children get more than half of their calories from that program. It would be a wonderful thing to make that the best school lunch program possible,” said Dr. Richard Besser, former CDC acting director.
But many public health experts are also wary of giving Kennedy credit, for fear it could lend credibility to other false information he promotes. He advocates drinking raw milk, for example, even though the pasteurization process kills off bacteria that can cause serious illness, including the fast-spreading avian flu.
“One of the dangerous things about RFK Jr. is that there are bits of things he says that are true, and they’re mixed in. And it makes it really hard to sort out what things you should follow because they’re based on fact, and which things are not,” Besser told ABC News, where he was former chief health and medical editor.
Experts also question Kennedy’s ability to counter powerful Washington lobbies — one of his stated main goals — in a Trump administration focused on working with big business on deregulating industries.
Abortion access
Another area where Kennedy could be out of line with the Trump administration is abortion access. Kennedy has said he supports legal abortion access until fetal viability (despite an earlier comment on the campaign trail that he later walked back about supporting a 15-week ban) and that such decisions should be up to women.
Many abortion rights advocates still expect the Trump administration to quickly move to rescind protections and halt legal fights the Biden administration initiated after the fall of Roe v. Wade — but are hopeful that Kennedy and the broader administration would not attempt sweeping bans.
“[Trump’s] obviously waffled on this and other issues a thousand times so I’m not going to trust every word he says, but I do think there’s the possibility that he and his administration has seen that actually, abortion access is very popular,” said Katie O’Connor, senior director of abortion policy at the National Women’s Law Center.
“We have seen that over the past three elections, and there could be pushback if this administration does something to further restrict abortion access.”
There are certainly members of Trump’s orbit who would support broader restrictions on abortion, but Trump himself has said he would not sign a federal ban if Congress passed one.
Some of the policies O’Connor expects to see rolled back would include the Pentagon paying for service members who need to cross state lines to get an abortion because of where they were stationed, as well as expanded access to abortion pills through telemedicine.
As HHS secretary, Kennedy could undo these rules and also build on the first Trump administration’s efforts. He could expand protections for health care providers who don’t want to perform abortion procedures, allowing more providers to deny care, and make it more difficult for private insurers to cover abortion, leaving it more expensive for patients, O’Connor said.
Large-scale bans, were they executed, would focus on removing access to the medication abortion pill called mifepristone, either by attempting to take medication abortion off the market by way of the FDA approval process, or employing a very old law called the Comstock Act to prohibit the pills from being mailed.
“I do hold out hope that this administration doesn’t want to expand political capital on abortion,” O’Connor said.
