Americans can again order four free at-home COVID tests from the federal government
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(NEW YORK) — Americans can once again order free at-home COVID-19 tests from the federal government starting Thursday ahead of the upcoming respiratory virus season.
This is the third year in a row the Biden-Harris administration has allowed Americans to order over-the-counter tests at no charge.
Anyone wanting to order tests can do so at COVID.gov/tests. Four tests will be shipped free by USPS, starting Sep. 30.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) first made the announcement last month that the free COVID tests program was restarting.
“As families start to move indoors this fall and begin spending time with their loved ones, both very old and very young, they will once again have the opportunity to order up to four new COVID-19 tests free of charge and have them sent directly to their homes,” Dawn O’Connell, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS, said during a media briefing at the time. “These tests will help keep families and their loved ones safe this fall and winter season.”
She added that the tests will be able to detect infection from currently circulating variants.
Currently, KP.3.1.1, an offshoot of the omicron variant, is the dominant variant in the U.S., accounting for an estimated 52.7% of cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
During the same media briefing, CDC director Dr. Mandy Cohen said immunity from vaccination and previous COVID infection have helped limit the burden of COVID on the health care system.
“I do want to acknowledge that we continue to see a lot of COVID-19 activity across the country right now in tests coming back from labs,” Cohen said, adding, “Circulating COVID disease is not translating into similar increases in emergency room visits and hospitalizations or deaths.”
(NEW YORK) — Breast cancer deaths have fallen by 44% compared to 35 years ago, saving nearly 520,000 lives, according to a new report by the American Cancer Society.
The dramatic decrease is a major milestone in the fight against breast cancer, according to Dr. Lisa Newman, a co-author of the report, released on Tuesday, the start of Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
“This decline is evidence of our success in better treatments for breast cancer, especially with targeted treatments,” Newman, chief of the section of breast surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, told ABC News.
Beyond advances in care, Newman noted that mammography has also played a crucial role in detecting cancer earlier.
In April, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force updated their guidelines, recommending that women at average risk for breast cancer get a mammogram every two years starting at age 40.
However, screening isn’t perfect, Newman stressed.
Women should watch for new lumps, skin changes, and nipple changes, including unusual discharge, pain, and redness.
Even if the last mammogram is clear, women should discuss any changes with a healthcare provider.
Steepest rise in new cases among women under 50
Though breast cancer deaths have dropped, new cases continue to rise.
From 2012 to 2021, breast cancer diagnoses increased by 1% each year, with the steepest rise among women under 50.
The reasons for the increase in diagnoses at a younger age remain unclear, Newman said.
“We speculate that it is related to differences in lifestyle and environment given the obesity epidemic and more women delaying their childbearing years and having fewer pregnancies over their lifetime,” she said.
Racial disparities in breast cancer persist
Yet despite lower overall death rates, racial disparities in breast cancer persist.
American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) women have seen no improvement in death rates, while Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) women face the fastest uptick in new cases, with a nearly 3% annual increase.
And despite having 10% fewer cases than white women, AIAN women are 6% more likely to die from the disease and receive fewer regular mammograms.
Black women face a 38% higher chance of dying from breast cancer and have worse outcomes at every stage and subtype, except for localized cancers, compared to white women.
“Studies show that Black women are more likely to receive mammograms at lower-quality facilities, face delays in diagnosing abnormalities, and experience delays in starting and completing treatment,” Newman explained.
Because African American women are more prone to triple negative breast cancer, a particularly deadly form of the disease, Newman said there is a strong push to improve the diversity in clinical trials.
In May of 2024, the ACS launched the VOICES of Black Women Study which will enroll 100,000 Black women aged 25 to 55 and follow them for 30 years.
Newman also pointed out that breast cancer can affect men, especially African American men, who have double the risk compared to White men.
While the report revealed many promising trends in breast cancer, the disease remains the second most common cancer among women in the U.S. after skin cancer and the leading cause of cancer deaths for Black and Hispanic women. In 2024, experts predict over 300,000 new invasive (stage I and above) breast cancer cases with more than 40,000 deaths.
The report’s findings are based on data from the national cancer tracking programs that includes information from the National Cancer Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
(BATTLE CREEK, Mich.) Hundreds of people gathered outside the WK Kellogg headquarters in Michigan on Tuesday calling for the company to hold up its promise to remove artificial dyes from its breakfast cereals sold in the U.S.
Nearly 10 years ago, Kellogg’s, the maker of Froot Loops and Apple Jacks, committed to removing such additives from its products by 2018.
While Kellogg’s has done so in other countries including Canada, which now makes Froot Loops with natural fruit juice concentrates, the cereals sold in the U.S. still contain both food dyes and a chemical preservative.
Food activist Vani Hari, also known as the Food Babe on social media, spoke to the crowd of demonstrators at the cereal giant’s offices in Battle Creek on Tuesday.
“I’m here for the moms, all the moms, who struggle to feed their children healthy food without added chemicals,” she said.
In response to the protests, Kellogg’s insisted its products are safe for consumption, saying its ingredients meet the federal standards set by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The agency has said that most children experience no adverse effects from color additives, but critics argue the FDA standards were developed without any assessment for possible neurological effects.
The protests come in the wake of a new California law known as the California School Food Safety Act that bans six potentially harmful dyes in foods served in California public schools. The ban includes all of the dyes in Froot Loops, plus Blue Dye No. 2 and Green Dye No. 3.
The bill was passed by state legislators in August and signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September.
Studies suggest that consumption of said dyes and colorants banned under the new California School Food Safety Act may be linked to hyperactivity and other neurobehavioral problems in some children, as the California Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment outlined in a 2021 report.
While there are still thousands of chemicals allowed for use in our country’s commercial food system, many of those that have been reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration have not been reevaluated for decades. Red 40, for example, was last evaluated for health risks in 1971.
Reports from the American Academy of Pediatrics align with this push to reassess the safety of artificial food coloring.
California previously made history in October 2023, when Newsom signed AB 418 into law, a first-of-its-kind bill that bans four harmful chemicals from candy, cereals, salad dressings and other processed foods in the state starting in 2027.
That law will end the use of brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben and Red Dye No. 3 in food products sold throughout the state.
Sara Anne Willette and her family plan on moving to the countryside in the South as COVID-19 continues to impact the immunocompromised community. — Courtesy of Sara Anne Willette
(NEW YORK) — Sara Anne Willette has spent more than 1,620 days in isolation since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The New Jersey resident took health precautions in public before the pandemic because of her common variable immunodeficiency, which means she doesn’t make enough antibodies to fight infections.
Simple tasks like going for a walk down the street or taking a trip to the grocery store are laden with safety hurdles and anxiety for Willette.
Stressful tasks, like moving from Iowa to New Jersey during the pandemic for her husband’s new job, are now even more taxing. The two drove overnight to avoid crowds at gas stations and rest stops, and she’s prepared to do it again. The substantial health precautions in her day-to-day life are forcing her and her family to pack up their life once more and look for a new home in the countryside.
“I’m angry that society is largely inaccessible and I have to risk my life for the bare minimum, like medical care,” Willette told ABC News in a phone call. “Why live in civilization if all of it is completely inaccessible?”
More than four years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Willette is among the immunocompromised and disabled Americans who’ve complete changed their way of living to survive.
Her anger was tinged with disappointment as she talked about how the rest of the world has gone back to normal despite the hundreds of people across the country dying from COVID-19 each week amid a summer surge of the virus.
COVID-19 has also been a debilitating event for tens of millions of people who have or are currently experiencing long COVID, which in some cases has been defined as a disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
With some lawmakers beginning to propose mask bans in hopes of reducing crime, it’s no longer an option for some to live life normally among the rest of society.
Willette was among the people ABC News checked back in with after previously talking to them about isolating two years after the pandemic began.
Finding a new normal
There are simple joys that Willette misses: having a garden, running, walking, letting her dogs run without a leash and drinking coffee on a porch.
She’s planning on moving to the mountains — somewhere between New Hampshire and Virginia — and gaining enough acreage to allow her and her family to embrace the activities they lost during the pandemic. However, being alone out in the countryside isn’t the goal for Willette.
Rather, she intends to build a pathogen-aware community. That means buying enough land so other disabled, immunocompromised or health-conscious able-bodied people who don’t want to get COVID-19 can join them and create a home of their own.
“We want something that feels like normal but is set up in a way that we decrease harm for everyone in the community,” Willette said. “We can’t do that in an urban area or even in a suburban area. There are too many risks.”
Her mother and mother-in-law intend to move and join Willette, her husband and her son on the property as well.
For Charis Hill, a California resident who has a systemic inflammatory disease and takes immunosuppressive medications, it’s been hard to access an in-person doctor’s appointment since many safety precautions for COVID-19 are no longer being taken in medical care facilities.
As someone with “high-level medical needs,” the lack of COVID precautions has even made seeking routine care a challenge.
“Just the fact that a medical environment that is supposed to know what a virus can do, most medical environments no longer require masking, and that’s what makes it unsafe for people like me to go, for anybody to go,” Hill told ABC over the phone.
“The impact of the delayed care, where people can’t go get routine care, that’s going to affect the whole health care system. Emergencies happen because of delayed care.”
Despite the stress and forced isolation, they find moments of joy growing their own food in their garden, and stay busy by working to reduce the local feral cat population through Trap-Neuter-Return practices.
They break their isolation monthly to meet at a park with a close-knit circle of friends who take similar safety precautions — they’re all masked, socially distanced and have tested beforehand.
“That’s really the only way for me to meet strangers and also to make new friends,” Hill said.
Mask bans would further bar immunocompromised people from public life, according to Hill.
Such bans “make it unsafe for us to exist,” Hill noted, because people may feel pressure not to wear masks when they’re sick or if immunocompromised people are worried about backlash for doing so.
With more people testing positive for COVID this summer, and with the fall and winter virus season ahead, Hill says society’s “new normal” should involve free testing, vaccines, access to at-home antiviral therapy paxlovid and flexible hybrid working options to mitigate the spread of illnesses.
“We need a new normal, and a new normal that is equitable for everyone, and that not only prioritizes high risk people, but that also reduces infection overall,” Hill said.
COVID concerns for the immunocompromised population
Immunocompromised people — about 3% of the adult population in the U.S., according to the National Institutes of Health — continue to face potentially serious medical complications or death when it comes to COVID-19. Even for those who were not previously at risk now have seen life-changing heath impacts.
“Long COVID can happen to anyone, and I have certainly seen young, healthy, vigorous athletes have prolonged, debilitating symptoms from long COVID,” Dr. Jeannina Smith, the medical director of University of Wisconsin’s Transplant Infectious Disease Program, told ABC over the phone.
However, society has largely appeared to have moved on. The CDC stopped recording some COVID-19 related data and some politicians have proposed mask bans as a potential solution to crime.
“It takes us a step back for public health,” Hill said. “We have other pandemics that are coming, and it’s going to make it harder to reenact mask mandates if we need them in the future.”
For the immunocompromised, regular society could seem like a minefield, according to Dr. Cassandra M. Pierre, the medical director of Public Health Programs and the associate hospital epidemiologist at Boston Medical Center.
She noted that people at higher risk for complications “are still, unfortunately, in our hospitals today. We see that they have this forced risk of going on to develop critical COVID or potentially even die. This is still occurring. COVID is still happening.”
This is all happening despite a better understanding of disease transmission and the information needed to be better equipped to empower communities to protect their health, Pierre added.
Patients have been harassed or mocked for wearing masks in public, Dr. Jeannina Smith noted, despite international and national medical organizations emphasizing the importance of mask wearing as a mitigation tactic for illnesses. Hill has experienced this first hand.
“You can’t look at someone and know that they’re receiving immunosuppression for an organ transplant or an autoimmune condition, and they remain at risk,” Smith said.
“Even if you don’t have individual risk, any person can still spread COVID to someone who has higher risk,” she said. “In fact, much of the spread continues to be from asymptomatic person. The very idea that we would criminalize wanting to protect our fellow citizens is pretty horrific.”
The federal government has recently changed its tune amid the summer COVID spike and is preparing for the upcoming fall and winter season by approving and granting emergency use authorization for updated COVID-19 vaccines and restarting its free at-home COVID tests program.
