Red Cross announces severe emergency blood shortage, calls on Americans to donate
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(NEW YORK) — The American Red Cross declared a severe emergency blood shortage on Monday and called on people to donate.
The humanitarian organization, which says it’s the largest supplier of blood products for hospitals and for patient need in the U.S., said the demand from hospitals has outpaced the available supply of blood.
Dr. Courtney Lawrence, divisional chief medical officer at American Red Cross, told ABC News that almost one-third of the organization’s blood stores across the country have been depleted due to hospital need.
Lawrence said inclement winter weather, which has forced more than 400 Red Cross blood drives around the U.S. to be canceled, is among the reasons that donations are down.
Additionally, the U.S. is experiencing a moderately severe flu season, with some states reporting record levels of weekly cases and hospitalizations.
“That can overwhelm our health care system, and it can also mean that donors may not be feeling well enough to come in to donate or may be busy taking care of their loved ones who are sick,” Lawrence said.
When blood supplies are low, it can affect the ability to treat patients in need including trauma patients, chemotherapy patients with underlying blood disorders, those living with sickle cell disease and others, Lawrence said. She called on Americans to donate if they’re able to.
Reihaneh Hajibeigi, 34, from Austin, Texas, was one of those patients in need, telling ABC News that blood transfusions saved her life.
Hajibeigi said she lost a lot of blood while giving birth to her first child in 2023, and that the hospital gave her some blood and sent her home with her husband and newborn daughter.
“After about a couple weeks, things started to not be so great,” she told ABC News. “What I assumed was just being new mom tired really turned into fatigue. I was losing a lot of blood. I was starting to just not feel so great”
When Hajibeigi went back to the doctor two and a half weeks after giving birth, she said medical staff discovered she had retained a roughly four-centimeter piece of placenta on her uterine wall that was becoming toxic.
Hajibeigi said she underwent a procedure the next morning and began hemorrhaging during the operation, losing about 40% of her total blood volume.
In the recovery room, Hajibeigi said she started to crash again from the loss of blood and doctors raced to give her a blood transfusion.
“Fortunately, they had the blood on hand. They were able to get it into my system and basically brought me back to life,” she said.
Hajibeigi said she hopes that by sharing her story, she can encourage people to donate if they’re able, especially knowing there’s a chance their donation can help someone in need.
“It just made it that much clearer how vital blood donations are and how much sometimes we take it for granted, just assuming that the blood supply was always going to be intact,” she said. “And in that case, I needed the blood. Wonderful.”
“It’s a scary thought to think what if the blood product that I needed wasn’t there?” Hajibeigi said. “Then what would have happened?”
(NEW YORK) — Food banks and pantries have been experiencing historic demand since SNAP benefits halted on Nov. 1 for many Americans due to the federal government shutdown.
That halt affected nearly 42 million Americans, many of whom are older or low-income, and use benefits to help pay for groceries and other essentials.
President Donald Trump late Wednesday night signed a funding bill to end the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt earlier said that full SNAP benefits will be paid out once the shutdown was resolved.
However, food assistance workers said the restoration of food assistance can’t come soon enough as they struggle to fill in the gap left behind by SNAP.
Cyndi Kirkhart, executive director at Facing Hunger Food Bank, said she’s been working at the food bank for 11 years and has never seen the surge in people she is seeing now, and that it is higher than what she saw during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Facing Hunger Food Bank — which serves 17 counties in West Virginia, Ohio and eastern Kentucky — said some locations in the southern part of West Virginia have seen a 1,800% increase in the number of families visiting.
“Typically, we do mobile pantry distribution, which are cars [lining] up [and] we load their car up with food,” she told ABC News. “At the most, we’ll see 250 families. The past week, solidly, we have seen 900 families at each distribution, at each site.”
Kirkhart said their mobile pantries have seen such demand that instead of sending large box trucks to load up supplies at the food bank, she has had to send tractor-trailers. She added that she only has two tractor-trailers, which puts a lot of pressure on drivers to load up and visit multiple distribution sites.
Kirkhart said her organization encourages individuals to go to the food pantries for food rather than the bank, but they will still serve people who visit the bank.
“We’ll still have maybe, over the course of a month, 50 people that will show up directly at the food bank for an emergency food box,” she said. “And these past two weeks at least, we have had 60 a day. … It’s non-stop.”
In Washington state, food banks are also seeing an exponential increase in visitors. Jordan Beaudry, development and communications manager at North Help Line — which provides emergency services including food aid — said there has been a surge at the two food banks the organization serves that has been years in the making.
Starting in 2022, “we saw our numbers practically double overnight, and it’s just been a steady increase since then,” he told ABC News. “We’re serving twice as many folks as we did three years ago, and that is sort of setting the stage going into this latest round of SNAP cuts and the government shutdown. … We’ve seen just a massive increase in the amount of folks accessing services, particularly since the pause on SNAP benefits.”
The most recent demand began in October, when it was first announced that SNAP benefits may be halted in November, Beaudry said.
From July through September, the banks saw an average of 1,086 visitors per week for the first two weeks of the month, according to data provided by Beaudry. In October, the average for the first two weeks was 1,136 per week. Last week, the banks saw 1,329 visits.
At one of the food banks, Beaudry said the last Thursday in October was the highest number of people the organization has ever seen on a Thursday, with about a 14% increase in households visiting to receive food.
Similarly, Kristen Wild, president and CEO of hunger relief organization Operation Food Search, which serves 25 counties in Missouri and Illinois, said the pantries, shelters and community sites where the organization’s supplies are distributed are seeing increases in people visiting between 30% and 50%.
She described a distribution event last week during which Operation Food Search had prepared 700 meals to issue starting at 10 a.m. CT. An hour before the event, the line of cars was 500 long and more than 200 families had to be turned away.
“We’ve had agencies report to us that they have had to shut down earlier than their typical operating hours because they have run out of food,” she told ABC News. “We’re seeing agencies are being approached by people looking for food who’ve never needed to use a pantry in the past because the SNAP benefits were sufficient enough for them to get the food resources that they needed.”
The organization also runs a metro market program, which is like a mobile grocery store, that has seen a surge in customers.
The program charges for food at or below cost but has recently started issuing $15 vouchers to customers due to the increase in demand, Wild said. Workers have also had to replenish shelves multiple times throughout a two-hour metro market stop due to the increase in traffic.
Wild added that 90% of food assistance comes from federal programs like SNAP and about 10% comes from food banks and food pantries. The halt in SNAP benefits has forced food banks to go into “overdrive” to make up as much of the gap as possible.
“We’ve had terrific community support, both in terms of more food donations, more financial donations, so we can purchase more food, but we can’t make up for the full SNAP gap,” she said.
(NEW YORK) — The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a final version of its report on pediatric gender-affirming care on Wednesday, claiming it found “medical dangers posed to children,” which is receiving pushback from medical groups.
The report alleged that gender-affirming care — including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and gender-affirming surgeries — caused significant, long-term damage.
It comes after HHS published in May an early version of what it referred to as a “comprehensive review” of transgender care for children and teens, in which it called for a broader use of psychotherapy for young people with gender dysphoria rather than gender-affirming medical interventions.
The HHS referred to the final version of the report as “peer-reviewed,” but some of those who reviewed the contents are researchers who have spoken against gender affirming care.
Some major medical groups have pushed back, stating that psychotherapy first is the standard approach in gender-affirming care and that additional care, such as hormonal therapies, only occurs after in-depth evaluations between patients and doctors.
The American Psychological Association (APA), which reviewed the report, argued it lacks transparency and that scientific research does not support the authors’ theories.
Experts in the gender-affirming care space questioned the validity of the findings, saying that studies have found that gender-affirming care is generally safe and that youth with gender dysphoria are typically evaluated, diagnosed and treated based on an individual assessment by qualified providers.
“This report does not add to the science. It adds to the noise around care for transgender young people, care that is provided by licensed clinicians according to a standard of care,” Kellan Baker, senior advisor for health policy at the Movement Advancement Project, an independent think tank that provides research, insight and analysis on LGBTQ+ issues, told ABC News.
“That standard of care is based on the same comparable quality of evidence as care across any other area of medicine,” Baker continued. “There is nothing new or unusual about care for transgender young people except for the extraordinary degree of political antagonism that is being focused on this very, very small group of young people.”
In a press release on Wednesday, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, called the report “a turning point for American medicine,” adding that “we are committed to ensuring that science, not ideology, guides America’s medical research.”
David Aizuss, MD, chair of the American Medical Association Board of Trustees and Susan J. Kressly, MD, FAAP, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, released a joint statement on Wednesday.
“We reject characterizations of our approach to gender-affirming care as negligent or ideologically driven, and take particular issue with the false assertion that our members have committed ‘malpractice’ or betrayed their oath in any way,” the statement read.
“These claims, rooted in politics and partisanship, misrepresent the consensus of medical science, undermine the professionalism of physicians, and risk harming vulnerable young people and their families,” Aizuss and Kressly added.
The final version of the HHS report listed nine authors, all of whom have expressed skeptical views of, or have opposed, pediatric gender-affirming care.
The initial May report did not list the names of its authors to “help maintain the integrity of this process.” Critics at the time pointed out that this prevented readers from gauging whether the names were credible or had any conflicts of interest.
The disclosures in the final report show that at least six of the nine authors have financial interests or have spoken out extensively opposing gender affirming care.
This includes authors who have been paid to offer expert testimony on legislative efforts to ban pediatric gender medicine and have published papers critical of pediatric gender medicine, including claims that such care does not improve depression or suicidality among trans youth.
The report included 10 reviewers, including individual physicians and medical groups, some of whom praised the report as “scientifically sound” and said the main findings and conclusions are “correct.”
Other reviewers were critical, including the APA, which accused the authors of the report of cherry-picking which studies it used in its findings and not justifying why other studies were excluded. Additionally, it says key findings in studies that were relied on were unexplained or absent.
“While the HHS Report purports to be a thorough, evidence-based assessment of gender-affirming care for transgender youth, its underlying methodology lacks sufficient transparency and clarity for its findings to be taken at face value,” the APA wrote in its review, found in the report’s supplement.
In conclusion, the group wrote, “the report’s claims fall short of the standard of methodological rigor that should be considered a prerequisite for policy guidance in clinical care.”
In a response to the report, the Endocrine Society said in a statement to ABC News that mental health care is already part of treating transgender and gender-diverse youth with health care protocols requiring initial mental health support and evaluations.
However, they add that access to medication such as hormone therapy can be used in conversations between patients, their families and their doctors. They add that such care is also relatively rare.
“The use of puberty-delaying medication or hormone therapy remains rare and reflects a cautious approach as recommended in our guideline,” the statement read. “Fewer than one in 1,000 U.S. adolescents with commercial insurance received either treatment during the five-year period from 2018 to 2022, according to a January 2025 study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. And our 2017 guidelines recommend against prescribing any medication for gender dysphoria before puberty starts.”
Gender-affirming care is supported by multiple major medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) and the APA, and the Endocrine Society.
Studies have shown that many of the treatment options are generally safe and that care can have a positive impact on mental health, which psychotherapy alone cannot provide, experts said.
Some experts have questioned the significance of interventions on long-term mental health as well as the possibility of regret and point out potential risks to future fertility.
Additionally, systematic reviews from Sweden, Finland and the U.K. have resulted in the three countries restricting gender-affirming care. England’s National Health Service ended prescribing puberty blockers for minors experiencing gender dysphoria outside of clinical trials. Sweden and Finland have followed psychotherapy-first models.
A woman receives a flu vaccination, October 15, 2025. Alejandro Martinez Velez/Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — Flu activity is increasing across the country, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
New York City is seeing some of the highest levels of flu-like activity across the country. States including Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Texas are seeing “moderate” activity of respiratory illnesses. All other states are seeing low or very low levels.
The CDC estimates that there have been at least 4.6 million illnesses, 49,000 hospitalizations, and 1,900 deaths from flu this season so far.
The bulk of flu illnesses so far are being linked to the new variant known as subclade K, according to hundreds of samples sent to the CDC. Of just over 900 flu samples, roughly 90% were A(H3N2). Of those that had further genetic testing, nearly 90% belonged to subclade K.
The mutations seen in the new variant result in a mismatch with this season’s flu vaccine composition, the CDC notes. Experts believe that the flu vaccine will still help reduce the risk of severe illness, including hospitalization and death.
Two pediatric flu deaths were reported this week, bringing the total to three for this season. Last season had a record tying 288 die from flu – the same number during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. It’s the highest levels seen since 2004, which is when flu child deaths became mandatory for states to report to CDC.
About 90% of kids that died from flu last season were not vaccinated, a CDC study found. Flu vaccinations among kids have dropped 10% points lower than pre-pandemic with about 40% of kids getting the shot this season.
About 140 million doses of the flu vaccine have been distributed nationally so far this season, compared to 128 million last season.
The CDC recommends that everyone over the age of 6 months get their annual flu shot. Experts say it is not too late to get vaccinated.
