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?”
Stock image of doctor and patient. (Westend61/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — As heart, kidney and metabolic problems progress to more advanced stages, a person’s risk of developing several cancers also rises sharply, a new study finds.
Cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic (CKM) syndrome is a disorder that occurs when heart disease, kidney problems and metabolic issues including obesity and diabetes all happen together, according to the American Heart Association.
About one in three U.S. adults have at least three risk factors for CKM syndrome, the AHA says.
Researchers used a claims database in Japan that included individuals with available health check-up data and insurance claims between April 2014 and August 2023.
People diagnosed with stage 3 CKM syndrome at the start of the study were 25% more likely to be diagnosed with one of 16 different cancers four years later in comparison to those with early CKM syndrome, according to the study published Monday in the journal Circulation.
Those who were diagnosed with stage 4 CKM syndrome had a 30% increased likelihood of having a cancer diagnosis four years later. Those diagnosed with stage 1 or stage 2 of the condition had a less than 5% chance of cancer diagnosis in four years.
“The study findings suggest that it is important to consider not only cardiovascular disease risk, but also cancer risk in people with CKM syndrome,” Dr. Hidehiro Kaneko, the study’s lead author and associate professor in the department of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Tokyo in Japan, said in a press release.
The study results accounted for age, gender and lifestyle factors including smoking, alcohol use and weight.
Individual symptoms such as high blood pressure are often used to determine certain cancer risks, but this study used a more patient-centered classification such as CKM syndrome staging as a predictor for certain cancers, according to the authors.
“CKM syndrome represents a complex interplay among the cardiovascular, kidney and metabolic systems, where dysfunction in one area may trigger or exacerbate dysfunction in others,” Kaneko said.
“Dysfunction in each of these systems is independently associated with cancer risk due to shared risk factors,” he continued. “This study suggests that the accumulation of risk factors within the framework of CKM syndrome may contribute to the development of various types of cancer.”
Because the study is a retrospective observational study, meaning it analyzes existing data, it can only speak to association between CKM syndrome and certain cancers, not causality.
Additionally, because the study was conducted in Japan, which has a very homogenous population, further research would be needed to replicate the results among the U.S. population, which is more diverse.
Jayanta Bhattacharya, director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies hearing in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, June 10, 2025. (Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Last week, the Trump administration announced it was banning the use of human fetal tissue from some abortions in federally funded medical research.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) said the policy would go into effect immediately and advance “science by investing in breakthrough technologies more capable of modeling human health and disease,” NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said in a statement.
Scientists told ABC News that research using human fetal tissue has contributed to understanding diseases better, such as HIV and Ebola, and helped in the development of some vaccines and drugs.
Some scientists worry the ban could prevent groundbreaking discoveries about the behaviors of certain diseases and stop the development of life-saving therapies.
“It’s not a scientific decision,” Dr. Lawrence Goldstein, a professor emeritus of cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California, San Diego, told ABC News. “It’s a moral decision that places the rights of fetal tissue that would be discarded above the rights of sick people who will benefit from that research.”
How human fetal tissue has been used
Human fetal tissue has been used to study serious diseases and disorders, including AIDS, cancer, Parkinson’s disease, dengue, Ebola, hepatitis C, diabetes and spinal cord injuries.
Cell lines have been created from human fetal tissue that have led to the development of vaccines for rubella, rabies, chickenpox, shingles and hepatitis A. Research has also led to the development of drugs to treat HIV, hemophilia and sepsis.
President Donald Trump himself benefited from the research: the experimental antibody treatment he took to treat COVID-19 was developed using cells derived from human fetal tissue. At the time, Trump praised the treatment as a “cure.”
The tissue has been also used in reproductive medicine research to study fertility issues, pregnancy issues, and pregnancy conditions such as pre-eclampsia.
Goldstein said that human fetal tissue research also helps create humanized mouse models to study human immune systems.
“Using fetal tissue, you can make mice that have human blood-forming and immune systems,” Goldstein said. “And that’s valuable because a lot of the viruses that trouble human health don’t grow properly in mice. But if you can make mice with human blood and immune systems, those viruses will frequently grow, and you can learn how to make therapies to block them.”
There are very strict guidelines that researchers have to follow when using human fetal tissue, ensuring they are in compliance with federal and sometimes state requirements.
Additionally, the research must be reviewed and approved by the NIH’s Institutional Review Board (IRB), which specifically assesses federally funded research that uses human subjects.
The IRB assures that donation and reception of human fetal tissue were done with consent and not coercion and that there were no enticements provided to the participant, the clinic or the research team.
A researcher with knowledge of the matter, who asked that their name not be used due to fears of retribution, told ABC News that federal law states that donation cannot be even brought up to a pregnant individual deciding to terminate their pregnancy before the decision to terminate.
“These are extremely important guardrails that are in place to ensure that everything is handled properly,” the researcher with knowledge of the matter said.
Impacts of ending NIH funding
The Trump administration first instituted a ban ending all human fetal tissue research at NIH in 2019, but it was reversed by the Biden administration in 2021.
The current ban stops NIH funds from supporting all “grants, cooperative agreements, other transaction awards and research and development contracts,” the agency said in a statement.
Some groups praised the Trump administration’s new policy, including the Independent Medical Alliance, a group that promoted unproven treatments during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There is no ethical justification for performing experiments on tissue derived from aborted human beings,” Dr. Joseph Varon, president and chief medical officer of the Independent Medical Alliance, said in a statement. “The fact this practice continued for years within federally funded research institutions shows just how far removed parts of HHS had become from foundational medical ethics. This correction is long overdue.”
However, some scientists say the ban will affect ongoing and future work.
Dr. Anita Bhattacharyya, an associate professor of cell and regenerative biology in the school of medicine and public health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said she was hoping to apply for a future NIH grant to study human fetal tissue research and will now not be able to do so.
Bhattacharyya explained she currently uses human-induced pluripotent stem cells, which are reprogrammed cells that are similar to embryonic stem cells, in her work. However, the loss of NIH funding for human fetal tissue research could affect future work.
“My reaction was, ‘How are we going to do some of our research if we can no longer use human fetal tissue?'” she recalled to ABC News. “In particular, my lab studies Down syndrome and so we know that in Down syndrome, the brain develops differently to lead to the intellectual disability that people with Down syndrome have.”
Bhattacharyya said human fetal tissue is valuable when studying Down syndrome or neuropsychiatric disorders because it can recapitulate what’s happening in brain development.
“And so that’s where the human fetal tissue really provides us with a benchmark or the ground truth so that we can validate our models,” she said.
Finding alternative methods of funding is another issue, scientists told ABC News. The NIH was the largest funder of research involving human fetal tissue, and no longer financially supporting such research may leave scientists scrambling to find other donors.
Goldstein said there are private disease foundations that will sometimes fund human fetal tissue research, such as the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, which funds stem-cell-related research in California.
However, experts say the hole left behind by the lack of NIH funding cannot be made up through private donations.
“There’s really nothing adequate to substitute for the federal effort,” Goldstein said. “It is the largest funder of medical research in the United States. It has systems in place to regulate quality and ensure that ethics and scientific principles are being adhered to. We really can’t move ahead as efficiently as we would like with the absence of the NIH.”
Although the NIH said tissue from spontaneous abortions will still be available, the researcher with knowledge of the matter said this tissue is very often not suitable for research purposes.
“The reason is because, most often, spontaneous abortion happens as a result of some sort of genetic abnormality or some injury, infection, some kind of damage to the fetus itself, that renders that tissue completely unusable for scientific research,” they said.
“Additionally, because spontaneous abortions are just that, they’re spontaneous and therefore completely unpredictable,” the researcher continued. “We have to be very careful in the way that we handle that tissue. It makes those studies intractable. And so, for that reason, spontaneous abortions are not a suitable replacement for fetal tissue research that we would normally obtain.”
Signage outside the Center for Disease Control (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, US, on Friday, Dec. 5, 2025. (Megan Varner/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Cigarette smoking among U.S. adults continues to fall to record low levels as e-cigarette use rises, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published early Thursday.
Nearly 10% of adults in the U.S. smoked cigarettes in 2024, the report found. This is down from about 11% in 2023, CDC data shows.
Rates of cigarette use have dramatically fallen since a landmark 1964 Surgeon General report warned about the dangers of cigarette smoking and linked it to lung cancer, chronic bronchitis and other serious diseases.
The 1964 report also found a 70% higher mortality rate among smokers and helped launch a nationwide anti-smoking campaign.
At the time, more than 42% of adult Americans were smokers, according to the Surgeon General.
“Decreased cigarette use is certainly in line with decades of trends and really hard work on the part of public health and education folks to get the word out about how awful cigarettes are and how deadly they are,” Dr. Maria Rahmandar, medical director of the substance use & prevention program in the division of adolescent and young adult medicine at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, told ABC News.
“However, with decreased cigarette use, that means that big tobacco companies are losing money, and so they’re always looking for new ways to capture customers and hook new people on powerfully addictive … nicotine,” she added.
The new CDC report found those living in rural areas were more likely to smoke more than city dwellers. More than 15% of those in non-metropolitan areas smoked cigarettes compared to those living in cities, the report noted.
Meanwhile, the report found that 7% of American adults used e-cigarettes, or vapes, in 2024.
This is a slight uptick from 6.5% of adults reporting e-cigarette use in 2023 and nearly double from the 3.7% of adults who reported using e-cigarettes in 2020, CDC data shows.
“I think we had a shot [at] the first tobacco‑free generation prior to e‑cigarettes coming onto the market. Unfortunately, it’s kind of derailed that progress,” Thomas Carr, director of national policy at the American Lung Association, told ABC News.
The report found that vaping patterns were similar to cigarettes by metro areas, where 6.1% reported using e-cigarettes compared to 9.2% in rural areas.
Previous CDC data found that men; those who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual; and those who report serious psychological distress are more likely to report current e-cigarette use.
The CDC has also previously found that some adults use e-cigarettes to try to quit smoking cigarettes. The health agency notes the Food and Drug Administration has not approved any e-cigarette to help people quit smoking.
Rahmandar said e-cigarettes have been marketed as a way for people to get off cigarettes, which she noted can help. But she cautioned that there are still many unknowns about e-cigarette harms.
“Cigarettes are terrible, and it is possible that e‑cigarettes are safer — not safe — safer than cigarettes,” she said. “So could it be better for somebody to switch that in a harm reduction philosophy? Yes, however, we still don’t know long term effects of e‑cigarettes, either … We know that there are immediate effects. There certainly are harmful chemicals, carcinogens, toxins, heavy metals, respiratory irritants and other things inside of there that certainly can cause immediate harm.”
By age, those between age 45 and 64 were most likely to be smokers followed by those between ages 25 and 44.
Among vapers, those between ages 18 and 24 had the highest prevalence of e-cigarette use followed by those between ages 25 and 44.
Previous CDC data has shown that the majority of young adults who use e-cigarettes have never smoked cigarettes.
“I think this is … the JUUL generation,” Carr said, referencing what was the most popular e-cigarette in the U.S. “From 2017 to 2019, they got teens to get hooked on JUUL, and they’re now adults, and unfortunately, they haven’t been able to quit using e-cigarettes.”
Tiffany Le, MD, is a pediatrics resident at UT Southwestern Medical Center and a member of the ABC News Medical Unit.
ABC News’ Liz Neporent contributed to this report.
