As FDA delays proposal to ban formaldehyde in hair relaxers, dermatologist shares safety tips for women
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(NEW YORK) — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has delayed consideration of a long-anticipated proposal to ban formaldehyde (FA) in hair-relaxing products, which some studies have linked to certain types of cancers.
It is not clear when the agency plans to consider the proposed rule, which was first entered in the Unified Agenda, a government registry of actions that administrative agencies plan to issue, last October.
If enacted, the rule would “ban formaldehyde and other FA-releasing chemicals as an ingredient in hair smoothing or hair straightening products marketed in the United States,” according to the language entered in the Unified Agenda.
Frequent use of hair-straightening products that include chemicals like formaldehyde has been found in studies to put women at a higher risk for uterine cancer, a type of cancer that starts in the uterus and is a risk factor for anyone with a uterus but the risk increases with age, especially during and after menopause, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A 2022 study found an association that women who self-reported frequent use of hair straightening products were more than twice as likely to later develop uterine cancer than women who did not use the products.
The study found that Black women may be more affected by the increased risk of uterine cancer not because of their race, but due to the fact that they use chemical hair straightening products at a higher rate. Frequent use of the products was defined as more than four times in the previous year, according to the study, which included more than 33,000 women between the ages of 35 to 74.
Scientists caution that it’s not clear yet if these products cause cancer. For now, research only hints at a probable link.
Formaldehyde is described by the Environmental Protection Agency as a “colorless, flammable gas” that can cause “adverse health effects” with exposure. When used in hair smoothing products, the formaldehyde is released into the air as a gas when the products are heated.
The Department of Health and Human Services lists formaldehyde as a “known carcinogen.”
The FDA has previously issued a warning stating that the use of hair smoothing products in an area that is not properly ventilated could lead to a risk of a person inhaling formaldehyde. In the warning, the agency acknowledged it began receiving “inquiries from consumers and salon professionals” about the safety of formaldehyde in products as far back as 20 years ago.
Safety tips for women in the absence of a ban
Dr. Angela Lamb, a New York City-based dermatologist, told ABC News’ Good Morning America Tuesday that women should read labels on their own and ask their salon provider about the ingredients in the products they’re using prior to undergoing treatments like hair straightening.
The three key ingredients to look for are formaldehyde, methylene glycol, and formalin, according to Lamb.
“You want to make sure, if you’re at a salon and you’re using something, if you have any reactions, let your salon provider know,” she said.
According to the FDA, possible reactions that have been reported range from eye problems to headaches, dizziness, nausea, chest pain, vomiting, coughing, wheezing and throat soreness.
Consumers can report bad reactions to the FDA by phone and online.
Lamb said if women want to avoid formaldehyde-containing products completely, they can opt for heat-styling options like roller sets and presses.
With those options, no chemicals are involved at all, according to Lamb.
(PHOENIX) — A 4-month-old baby died in Arizona last week after suffering a heat-related illness while on a boat, according to police.
The infant’s death comes amid an ongoing heat wave in the U.S. affecting tens of millions of people across multiple states.
The infant, who was not identified by police, was rescued from a boat on Lake Havasu on July 5 and transported to a local hospital, according to authorities.
From there, the infant was taken to Phoenix Children’s Hospital, where they “succumbed to their injuries,” the Mohave County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement released Monday.
The sheriff’s office said the investigation into the child’s death is “ongoing.”
A sheriff spokesperson told ABC News Wednesday the office is not releasing any further information.
On Wednesday, a spokesperson for the medical examiner’s office in Maricopa County, where Phoenix Children’s Hospital is located, identified the infant as Tanna Rae Wroblewski and said her cause of death has not yet been determined.
A GoFundMe page established for the Wroblewski family states that they were enjoying a “family day on the lake” when the infant “lost consciousness” and family members started performing CPR.
“Lake Havasu City Fire Department quickly arrived to take over life-saving procedures. Tanna was rushed to Havasu Regional Medical Center where they continued to work on her to get a pulse,” the fundraiser states. “She was then airlifted to Phoenix Children’s Hospital where they did everything in their power to revive her, but God had other plans, and took Tanna to heaven that night.”
Attempts to reach members of the Wroblewski family by ABC News were not successful.
In the Lake Havasu area, temperatures over the past week have hit triple digits, reaching as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the National Weather Service.
As of Tuesday, more than 70 million people were under heat alerts in the West amid a scorching heat wave enveloping much of the U.S., but particularly the West Coast.
How to protect kids from heat
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children are more susceptible than adults to the health effects of extreme temperatures, including extreme heat, because they cannot regulate their body temperature as well as adults.
When it comes to extreme heat, children may suffer health effects including heat exhaustion, heat cramps and heat stroke, according to the AAP.
Parents and caregivers should do their best to keep kids in indoor, air-conditioned areas in periods of extreme heat, and make sure kids are well-rested and hydrated.
Symptoms of heat-related illness to watch for in babies and kids include faintness, extreme tiredness, intense thirst, headaches, fever, nausea, vomiting, hyperventilation and skin numbness or tingling, according to the AAP.
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.
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, ended weeks of speculation after selecting Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday.
During his time as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and governor of the North Star State, Walz has pushed for access to abortion and other reproductive health care. He’s also lowered drug prices and has proposed a public buy-in option for insurance.
Here’s where Walz stands on various health care issues:
Reproductive rights
Walz has been a supporter of abortion rights and was vocal about protecting access after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
In January 2023, he signed the Protect Reproductive Options (PRO) Act, which says everyone has a “fundamental right to make decisions about reproductive health” including abortion care, fertility treatments, contraception, sterilization and other care.
Prior to the PRO Act being signed, Minnesota already had strong abortion laws. The state does not prohibit abortion based on how far along someone is in their pregnancy and a 1995 state Supreme Court case held that the state Constitution protects the right to choose to have an abortion.
Walz, however, said the law is a “firewall against efforts to reverse reproductive freedom.”
In April 2023, he also signed the Reproductive Freedom Defense Act, which protects patients who travel to Minnesota to seek abortion care — as well as abortion providers — from legal action in other states.
Additionally, when Harris became the first vice president to visit an abortion clinic run by Planned Parenthood this year, she was joined by Walz.
The governor has also spoken about protecting access to fertility treatments and IVF. The issue is a personal one for Walz; his wife, Gwen, underwent IVF procedures for years before welcoming the first of their two children.
“When my wife and I decided to have children, we spent years going through infertility treatments,” Walz said Tuesday during his first joint appearance with Harris at a rally in Philadelphia. “I remember praying every night for a call for good news, the pit in my stomach when the phone rang and the agony when we heard that the treatments hadn’t worked.”
Access to health insurance
During his inaugural speech in 2019, Walz called health care “a basic human right.”
“What Minnesotans want from their health care is simple,” he said. “They don’t want to get sick in the first place. But if they do, they want care at a price they can afford and at a location close to home.”
During his time in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served from 2007 to 2019, Walz voted for the Affordable Care Act in 2010, the landmark health care bill that was signed into law by then-President Barack Obama.
Walz and the Democratic leadership in Minnesota have attempted to expand MinnesotaCare, the state’s public health insurance program, to allow all residents — regardless of income — the option to buy in.
There are two bills currently under consideration in the Minnesota Legislature – HF 4745 and SF 4778 — but the governor’s office told local media the bills would not likely pass this year.
The governor has worked to expand access to health care with a record 146,445 residents signing up for private health plans for 2024 during the open enrollment period for MNsure, the state’s official health insurance marketplace, the governor’s office said.
Capping drug prices
In 2020, Walz signed the Alec Smith Insulin Affordability Act, allowing those in urgent need of insulin to go to their pharmacy once in a 12-month period and receive a one-time, 30-day supply of insulin for a $35 co-pay.
The long-term component of the law allows eligible individuals to receive insulin for up to one year, with an option to renew, and receive a 90-day supply with a co-pay cap of $50.
The governor also announced earlier this year that the state’s Department of Health was publishing a list of more than 300 drugs whose prices will be required to be reported by manufacturers, wholesale retailers and pharmacies.
These policies are similar to those implemented under the Biden-Harris administration. The cost of insulin has been capped at $35 per month for many Americans, and the federal government has begun direct price negotiations on 10 widely used drugs paid for by Medicare Part D, with plans to add more drugs to the list in the future.
