E coli outbreak linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders declared over: CDC
(NEW YORK) — The deadly E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald’s Quarter Pounders was declared over on Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In total, 104 people reported falling ill across 14 states with about one-third of them being hospitalized, according to the CDC.
The true number of people who got sick was likely much higher because many people recover from E. coli without medical care and are never tested, the CDC noted.
Americans between ages 1 and 88 were affected in the outbreak, according to he CDC. Colorado had the greatest number of cases with at least 30 people falling ill. The state also reported one death.
An outbreak notice was first released by the CDC in late October. Evidence from health officials’ investigation at the time showed that slivered onions served on Quarter Pounders were a likely source of contamination.
Nearly all the people who fell ill and were interviewed by health officials reported eating at McDonald’s and the overwhelming majority remembered eating a menu item that contained the fresh, slivered onions, according to the CDC.
The fast food chain’s distributor of the onions, Taylor Farms, initiated a voluntary recall of the onions in late October. McDonald’s stopped using the ingredient and removed the Quarter Pounder entirely off the menu in a dozen states.
The latest reported illness was on Oct 21. All the confirmed cases occurred before the onions were recalled and the ingredient was taken off of the McDonald’s menu at some locations, according to health officials.
The fast-food chain is no longer serving the recalled onions and there “does not appear to be a continued food safety concern related to this outbreak,” the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Tuesday. The agency also noted that its investigation is now closed.
McDonald’s North America chief Impact officer Michael Gonda and chief supply chain officer Cesar Piña shared a message on Tuesday, saying the announcements from the CDC and FDA provide “certainty and validation” that the outbreak is over and the risk to the public has remained low since late October.
While the issue had been fully contained — and any contaminated product associated with this issue had been removed from our supply chain as of Oct. 22, 2024 — it can now be classified as “closed” and remediated,” the message read, in part.
(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.”
(WASHINGTON) — Vice President Kamala Harris said former President Donald Trump will roll back health care protections if he wins the presidential election.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday in Madison, Wisconsin, Harris said Trump unsuccessfully tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the landmark law signed by then-President Barack Obama in 2010, while he was president.
“Insurance companies could go back to a time where they would deny you coverage for health insurance based on pre-existing conditions, such being a survivor of breast cancer, asthma, diabetes,” Harris said. “The American people, regardless of who they are voting for, know the importance of Obamacare in terms of expanding coverage to health care, based on the fundamental principle I hold deeply: access to health care should be a right and not just a privilege for those who can afford it.”
“Health care for all Americans is on the line in this election,” Harris continued.
In a post on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump falsely claimed not wanting to end the ACA, even though he repeatedly tried to do so while president.
Here is what we know about Trump’s health care agenda if he is elected to a second term:
‘Concepts’ of a heath care plan
During the ABC News presidential debate in September, Trump said he was interested in replacing the ACA — also known as “Obamacare” — but implied that he didn’t have any specific plans in place.
“Obamacare was lousy health care. Always was,” Trump said. “It’s not very good today and, what I said, that if we come up with something, we are working on things, we’re going to do it and we’re going to replace it.”
When asked to clarify if he had a health care plan, the former president said he had “concepts of a plan” to replace the ACA but provided no details.
“If we can come up with a plan that’s going to cost our people, our population, less money and be better health care than Obamacare, then I would absolutely do it,” Trump said.
After Harris’ press conference on Thursday, Trump took to Truth Social to deny wanting to end the ACA.
“Lyin’ Kamala is giving a News Conference now, saying that I want to end the Affordable Care Act. I never mentioned doing that, never even thought about such a thing,” he wrote Thursday morning.
Trump made several attempts to repeal the ACA during his presidency but failed to do so.
He attempted to partially repeal the ACA by passing the American Health Care Act (ACHA). The plan would have repealed the individual mandate and the employer mandate, amended Medicaid eligibility and weakened protections for patients with pre-existing conditions.
The ACHA passed the House in May 2017 but failed to pass in the Senate. Perhaps mostly infamously, the Senate attempted to pass a so-called “skinny repeal” in late July 2017 but it was rejected, with Republican Sens. John McCain, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski siding with Senate Democrats to kill the bill.
During a closed-door campaign event for a fellow Republican House candidate earlier this week, House Speaker Mike Johnson said that there will be “no Obamacare.”
“We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state,” Johnson said in footage first reported by NBC News. “Health care is one of the sectors, but we need this across the board.”
“No Obamacare?” an attendee of the event asked Johnson.
“No Obamacare,” Johnson replied. “The ACA is so deeply ingrained, we need massive reform to make this work, and we got a lot of ideas on how to do that.”
Trump’s campaign has worked to separate itself from the speaker’s comments with Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, telling ABC News in a statement that repealing the ACA is “not President Trump’s policy position.”
“As President Trump has said, he will make our health care system better by increasing transparency, promoting choice and competition, and expanding access to new affordable health care and insurance options. Kamala Harris broke our health care system, President Trump will fix it,” the statement continued.
The 2024 GOP platform currently calls for expanding access to “new” affordable health care and prescription drug access as well as protecting Medicare and increasing transparency in the health care sector.
Trump enlists Kennedy to oversee health care policy
Trump has also suggested that he intends to tap Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — who dropped out of the presidential race in August and endorsed Trump — to help shape health care policies if he wins a second term.
During the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner — an annual white-tie dinner to raise money for Catholic charities — earlier this month, Trump said Kennedy will “make us a healthier place.”
“We’re gonna let him go wild for a little while, then I’m gonna have to maybe reign him back, because he’s got some pretty wild ideas, but most of them are really good,” Trump said at the dinner. “I think he’s a — he’s a good man, and he believes, he believes the environment, the healthy people. He wants healthy people, he wants healthy food. And he’s going to do it. He’s going to have a big chance to do it, because we do need that.”
Kennedy said Trump has “promised” him “control of the public health agencies,” but Trump’s team said no decisions have been made yet on who will be leading these agencies if he wins the election.
However, Trump implied during a rally in Henderson, Nevada, on Thursday that Kennedy would play a role in shaping women’s health care policies.
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr., we have,” Trump said. “And he’s gonna work on health, and women’s health, and all of the different reasons ’cause we’re not really a wealthy or a healthy country. We’re not.”
There are currently no women’s health care issues listed in the 2024 GOP platform aside from keeping “men out of women’s sports.”
“The only thing President Trump and his campaign team are focused on is winning on November 5th. Everything after that is after that, and President Trump has made clear that Bobby Kennedy will play an important role,” Jason Miller, senior adviser to the Trump campaign told ABC News in a statement.
In response to Trump saying Kennedy will oversee women’s health, Harris reposted a clip of Trump’s comments on X with the caption “No” followed by a heart emoji.
The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to ABC News’ requests for comment.
ABC News’ Lalee Ibssa, Soorin Kim, Will McDuffie, Lauren Peller and Kelsey Walsh contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Nicole Hallingstad credits her cat, Rudy, with finding her breast cancer.
Despite an unremarkable mammogram screening just seven months earlier, the 42-year-old knew something was wrong when Rudy kept pawing at something on the right side of her chest.
Hallingstad had another mammogram, which this time found a golf-ball-sized tumor in her breast that she said was from a fast-growing form of breast cancer.
After surgery, she needed both radiation and chemotherapy – but neither were available where she lived.
Hallingstad faced a difficult decision. Her options were to travel more than 1,000 miles once a month for chemotherapy and then relocate for six weeks of radiation treatment, or move to another state where she could get chemotherapy and radiation in one place. Hallingstad chose the latter.
“I was very fortunate that I was able to take the option to move and continue working and receive the care I needed,” Hallingstad told ABC News. “But that is a choice that is unsustainable for far too many Native women, and frankly, uncertain.”
Why was cancer care so inaccessible for Hallingstad? Because she lived in Alaska.
Hallingstad, a member of the Tlingit and Haida Native Indian Tribes of Alaska, faced profound barriers to breast cancer care that are shared by many American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) women. These barriers have contributed to growing disparities over the last three decades.
“It’s often really difficult to get to a qualified health care center that is close to the rural areas where so many of our people live,” Hallingstad said. “And transportation is not readily available for many people to get the trip to the center, to get their screening to even have access to the kind of machinery that is needed for this important treatment work.”
A recent report by the American Cancer Society (ACS) showed that the rate of breast cancer deaths among U.S. women has decreased by 44% from 1989 to 2022. But that progress has not held true for all women, including AI/AN women, whose death rates have remained unchanged during that same time.
While AI/AN women have a 10% lower incidence of breast cancer than white women, they have a 6% higher mortality rate, according to the ACS.
The ACS also found that only about half of AI/AN women over 40 years old surveyed for the report said they’d had a mammogram in the last two years, compared to 68% of white women. That lack of timely screenings increased the risk of discovering cancer in more advanced stages, which in turn could result in higher death rates.
“This is a population for which we are very concerned,” Karen Knudsen, CEO of the American Cancer Society, told ABC News. “Given the mammography rates [of AI/AN women] that we’re actually seeing, which are well behind other women across the country.
Knudsen emphasized the need to “create that additional awareness about the importance of getting screened for breast cancer early because of the link to improved outcomes,” especially in Indigenous communities.
There are also cultural barriers to cancer care and awareness. “Culturally, we don’t often speak about very deep illness, because we don’t want to give it life,” Hallingstad said.
That fear, not necessarily shared by all Indigenous communities, is a common reason people from any background may choose not to discuss cancer risk, or to seek help if they think they have a serious health problem.
Melissa Buffalo, an enrolled member of the Meskwaki Nation of Iowa, is the CEO of the American Indian Cancer Foundation, where she works alongside Hallingstad. Her organization recently received a grant to study the knowledge and beliefs surrounding cancer and clinical trials among Indigenous people in Minnesota. Buffalo said she hopes to “create resources and tools that are culturally relevant, culturally tailored, so that we can help to build trust within these healthcare systems.”
Advocates like Buffalo and organizations like the ACS are also creating toolkits to help existing systems increase their outreach to AI/AN women. However, “there is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach to everything,” Dr. Melissa Simon, an OB/GYN at Northwestern University and founder of the Chicago Cancer Health Equity Collaborative, told ABC News.
“We have to also acknowledge that the patient has some variation too, just like the cancer itself. To treat it has some variation,” Simon said.
“We have to talk about it,” Hallingstad said about breast cancer in the Indigenous community. “We need to understand treatment options. We need to bring care facilities closer and we need to make sure our populations are being screened and are following treatment.”
Jade A. Cobern, MD, MPH is a physician board-certified in pediatrics and preventive medicine and a medical fellow of the ABC News Medical Unit.
Sejal Parekh, M.D., is a board-certified, practicing pediatrician and a member of the ABC News Medical Unit.