Surgeon general warns of link between alcohol consumption and cancer risk
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(NEW YORK) — The U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on Friday warning of a link between alcohol consumption and cancer risk.
Alcohol consumption is the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States, after tobacco and obesity, according to the Surgeon General’s advisory.
For some cancers, including breast, mouth, and throat cancers, the risk of developing cancer may increase with one or fewer drinks per day, the advisory states.
Despite a growing body of evidence, fewer than half of Americans recognize alcohol consumption as a risk factor for cancer, according to the advisory.
A person’s risk of developing cancer due to alcohol consumption is also determined by other factors, including biological, economic, environmental and social, the advisory says.
“Alcohol is a well-established, preventable cause of cancer responsible for about 100,000 cases of cancer and 20,000 cancer deaths annually in the United States – greater than the 13,500 alcohol-associated traffic crash fatalities per year in the U.S. – yet the majority of Americans are unaware of this risk,” U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said in a statement. “This Advisory lays out steps we can all take to increase awareness of alcohol’s cancer risk and minimize harm.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(LOS ANGELES) — The percentage of emergency department (ED) visits related to fire and smoke inhalation rose dramatically in the days immediately after the Los Angeles wildfires last month, new data published Thursday shows.
The wildfires broke out in the Pacific Palisades and in Eaton Canyon on Jan. 7. Although several destructive wildfires emerged, the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire caused the most damage.
Fueled by strong winds and dry weather, the fires burned more than 57,000 acres, destroyed about 16,000 structures, and killed at least 29 people, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
A team from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reviewed data from the county’s Syndromic Surveillance program, which receives and analyzes real-time data from most county EDs.
By collecting this data, the program can detect early warning signals of a potential public health threat that requires a response and alert health care professionals, according to the department of health.
ED visits, referred to in the report as “encounters,” were classified as being wildfire-associated if fire or smoke inhalation–related terms were listed in the chief complaints or the diagnoses sections.
The team looked at three periods: a three-week period before the wildfires began, the first six days of the wildfires and the week after the wildfires began.
Data showed the average percentage of ED visits associated with the wildfires increased eightfold from 0.06% to 0.52% in the six days after the wildfires. The peak was seen on Jan. 8, with 1.01% of all ED visits related to the wildfires. During the week after the wildfires began, ED visits decreased but still remained elevated at 0.2% compared to baseline.
The average percentage of ED visits was found to be linked to an increase in the average daily Air Quality Index (AQI), which is put out by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Average daily AQI rose from 75, which is classified as “moderate level of concern” to an average of 110, classified as “unhealthy for sensitive groups,” in the six days after the wildfires began. In the week following the outbreak of the fires, average daily AQI returned to “moderate” at 58.
The report found a small increase in the average percentage of burn-related injuries and eye-related injuries but there were no increases seen in the percentage of visits related to asthma or cardiovascular reasons.
In contrast, the report found that immediately after the wildfires began, all-cause ED encounters — meaning visits to the department for any reason — decreased by 9%.
The authors stated that the decrease could for multiple reasons, with some including school closures, business closures, displacements, challenges accessing health care, residents seeking care in clinics or urgent care centers, or residents visiting EDs in neighboring counties.
“Near real-time surveillance of health outcomes during and after wildfires can estimate effects on health care use, serve as an early warning for acute health impacts, and identify opportunities for intervention,” the authors wrote. “Further analyses are planned to identify which illnesses have most affected specific populations.”
(WASHINGTON) — In his first public comments on the measles outbreak hitting West Texas and New Mexico, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent vaccine skeptic whose first steps in combatting the outbreak will be closely watched, said his department was monitoring the situation daily but called it “not unusual.”
“Incidentally, there have been four measles outbreaks this year in this country. Last year there were 16. So, it’s not unusual, we have measles outbreaks every year,” Kennedy said Wednesday at the White House.
However, some public health experts were quick to point out that the outbreak in Texas has defied America’s recent history with highly contagious disease.
Prior to this outbreak, the U.S. had not seen a death from measles since 2015. And in 2000, years after the U.S. implemented a two-dose vaccine schedule, measles was declared eliminated from the U.S., meaning that the disease had stopped spreading within the country.
Only in recent years have cases and outbreaks been rising, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico is already drawing close to the halfway mark of total cases seen nationally last year, when there were at least 285 cases of measles – which were also the highest numbers since 2019, according to the CDC’s latest figures.
And while there were 16 outbreaks last year, that was a four-time increase from the number of outbreaks in 2023, when there were just four outbreaks. The U.S. has nearly hit that 2023 number already, just two months into 2025.
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, called Kennedy’s comments about measles cases happening “every year” an attempt to normalize an outbreak that has been anything but normal.
“First of all, we eliminated measles from this country by the year 2000. The reason measles have come back is because a critical percentage of parents have chosen not to vaccinate their children, because they’ve gotten misinformation and disinformation from people like him and his Children’s Health Defense,” Offit told ABC News.
Children’s Health Defense, a group founded by Kennedy, advocates against the recommended vaccine schedule for children.
“It’s unconscionable enough that he’s done that, but that he sort of glibly says, well, measles outbreaks occur every year — the point is they don’t have to occur at all, because we’ve shown we could eliminate this disease,” Offit said.
ABC News has reached out to HHS about RFK Jr.’s comments.
The increase in cases and outbreaks over the last few years coincides with decreasing vaccination coverage for measles among kindergarteners nationally from 95.2% during the 2019-2020 school year to 92.7% in the 2023-2024 school year – leaving about 280,000 kindergartners at risk, according to the CDC.
Kennedy, prior to taking his role as HHS secretary, said the measles vaccine is effective at preventing measles, but has also suggested that it’s not necessary because people who die from measles are typically malnourished or have other comorbidities.
“The measles vaccine definitely eliminates measles, or, you know, close to eliminates it,” Kennedy said in 2022.
But he went on to question the deadliness of the disease.
“In 1963, it was killing only 400 kids a year. Mainly, they were kids who had malnutrition, or had some other devastating co-morbidity,” Kennedy said. “Those were the kids who were dying.”
Kennedy has also questioned that the deaths of 83 people – mostly young children – in Samoa in 2019 were caused by measles, despite widespread evidence that the deaths were due to an outbreak of the disease caused by under-vaccination in the American territory.
“Nobody died in Samoa from measles. They were dying from a bad vaccine,” Kennedy told an interviewer last year.
20% of kids with measles in the U.S. require hospitalization, said 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, often for measles pneumonia, measles diarrhea, measles encephalitis or deafness from measles otitis, an ear infection — many of which can be life-threatening conditions.
“This is a bad, bad actor. And I’m really concerned that this thing is continuing to accelerate and expand,” Hotez said Wednesday night in an interview on MSNBC.
Doctors in West Texas have described shock and feaver-treating a disease they thought was something of the past.
“This is the first time I’ve had any professional experience with a measles outbreak,” Dr. Lara Johnson, pediatrician and Chief Medical Officer at Covenant Children’s and Covenant Health in Lubbock, who is currently treating measles patients from the outbreak in West Texas, told ABC news.
“I saw one travel-related case when I was in medical school, very briefly, but at that time, back in around 2000, we really thought that we’d eradicated measles from the United States and didn’t have any anticipation of seeing any outbreaks here,” she said.
The outbreak in Texas is a prime example of the risk posed to unvaccinated communities. Vaccine exemptions among children in Gaines County, the epicenter of the outbreak, have grown dramatically in the past few years. Roughly 7.5% of kindergarteners had filed an exemption for at least one vaccine in 2013. 10 years later, that number rose to over 17.5% – one of the highest in all of Texas, state health data shows.
As the response to the outbreak in Texas and New Mexico continues, with cases expected to significantly rise, public health experts like Hotez and Offit say they’re watching Kennedy, as leader of the nation’s health department, to encourage swift surveillance and widespread vaccination.
“I want him to say to the American public that there’s a safe way to prevent these outbreaks from happening so that we don’t have the tragedy like what just happened in West Texas,” Offit said. “There’s so much in medicine you don’t know. There’s so much we can’t do. This we know. This we can do.”
(NEW YORK) — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday approved a new type of prescription pain medication for adults to treat moderate to severe acute pain.
The drug, called Journavx (suzetrigine) and manufactured by biotech company Vertex Pharmaceuticals, is a non-opioid painkiller, which doesn’t have addictive properties, unlike opioids often used for this type of pain.
This is the first class of non-opioid pain medication approved to treat moderate to severe acute pain approved by the FDA in more than 20 years.
“Today’s approval is an important public health milestone in acute pain management,” said Dr. Jacqueline Corrigan-Curay, acting director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, in a press release. “A new non-opioid analgesic therapeutic class for acute pain offers an opportunity to mitigate certain risks associated with using an opioid for pain and provides patients with another treatment option.”
In two clinical trials, tested on adults between ages 18 and 80, Journavx was found to reduce moderate to severe acute pain for adults from baseline by about 50% in 48 hours.
The average time to meaningful pain relief ranged from two to four hours, compared to eight hours in the placebo group.
Journavx works by inhibiting the NaV1.8 pain signal in the peripheral nervous system. This channel is not expressed in the brain or anywhere else in the central nervous system, therefore the drug does not have addictive properties like opioids, according to Vertex.
Journavx was found to be as similarly effective as hydrocodone, an opioid pain medication, for reducing acute pain, with the added benefit of being a non-opioid and non-addictive drug.
In another clinical trial, the drug was tested in patients with a broader range of surgical and non-surgical acute pain conditions and was found to be safe and effective.
More than 80% of patients in this clinical trial rated Journavx as a good, very good or excellent pain medication when investigating multiple acute pain types.
The new drug “offers a safer option for managing moderate-to-severe acute pain, reducing reliance on opioids,” Dr. Jianguo Cheng, a professor of anesthesiology and medical director of the Cleveland Clinic Consortium for Pain at Cleveland Clinic, who was not involved in the clinical trials, told ABC News. “It offers rapid relief and can be integrated into postoperative pain protocols or acute pain scenarios where immediate relief is critical.”
“By managing acute pain effectively, [Journavx] may help prevent the transition to chronic pain, reducing the need for long-term pain management strategies,” he added.
