Air pollution, FDA on food dyes, measles update

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Food companies agree to phase out certain synthetic dyes

The food industry will largely remove eight synthetic dyes from the U.S. food supply by the end of 2026, the Department of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday, a significant win for HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the broader “Make America Healthy Again” movement. 

During a Tuesday press conference, newly installed FDA Commissioner Marty Makary cast the move as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to curb chronic disease. “ADHD is not a genetic problem and our obesity epidemic is not a willpower problem, it’s something adults have done to children,” he said. 

While companies have consented to removing the dyes, there is no formal ban or legal agreement requiring them to do so, Makary said. All of the dyes affected by the measure are petroleum-based, and six are common ingredients in brightly colored foods like M&Ms, Froot Loops, and Gatorade. They are: Blue No. 1, Blue No. 2, Green No. 3, Red No. 40, Yellow No. 5, Yellow No. 6. But the industry’s voluntary withdrawal also includes two lesser known dyes, Orange B and Citrus Red 2.  Read more from Sarah Todd and Lizzy Lawrence. 

Major women’s health research program to suffer federal funding cuts

The Women’s Health Initiative, a decades-old research initiative supported by the National Institutes of Health, will have its government funding reduced this September, according to an announcement sent Tuesday to its 40 regional centers. The program’s coordinating center is set to continue operations through January, but now faces uncertain funding from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. 

Since 1991, the initiative has studied more than 161,000 women and changed health care dramatically. One notable finding in 2002 revealed that hormone replacement therapy during menopause was associated with breast cancer risk, leading to an immediate drop in prescriptions nationwide. The initiative also found that calcium supplements don’t prevent fractures and low-fat diets don’t prevent breast or colorectal cancer, notes STAT’s Liz Cooney.

The announcement has already led to downstream effects, like the loss of four positions at Ohio State focused on conducting WHI-supported research. “These contract terminations will significantly impact ongoing research and data collection,” the organization’s statement warned, noting that without continued funding, researchers will lose their ability to generate new insights about the health of older women, “one of the fastest-growing segments of our population.” Read more. 

The ‘insane’ calculus that led to a 150% drug price hike

A drug company buying the rights to a medication used to treat a rare pediatric growth disorder and immediately hiking its price from $5,882 per vial to $14,705 appears, at first glance, to be perfect fodder for pharmaceutical industry critics. 

But Eton Pharmaceuticals is arguing there is no other way to keep the treatment on the market and remain in the black, and employing a twist, too: being willing to take a substantial loss on patients covered by Medicaid. 

In essence, the company is using creative means to skirt a provision in the American Rescue Plan Act that requires programs to pay a rebate to Medicaid if they raise a drug’s price beyond the rate of inflation. To compensate for those rebates, the company will rely on commercial insurers paying the exorbitant price — banking on the payers to shell out for a rare drug used to treat a tiny population of children. Ed Silverman explains the math.

More measles misinformation

Amid a measles outbreak and a government response led by a health secretary who has repeatedly cast doubt on the safety and efficacy of the MMR vaccine, the public remains exposed to a torrent of misinformation regarding measles, according to a new KFF survey. 

Over one-third of Republicans polled said the long-discredited theory linking the MMR vaccine to autism was definitely or probably true, compared to just 10% of Democrats. And roughly 3 in 10 adults overall falsely believe that Vitamin A can protect against measles transmission (limited, largely decades-old evidence shows it can reduce the disease’s deadliness, not that it can prevent infection in the first place). 

While the share of Americans with erroneous beliefs regarding measles has not risen across the board, nearly everybody is at least exposed to the misleading messaging, according to the survey. “This is what one would expect when people are confused by conflicting messages coming from people in positions of authority,” said Kelly Moore, president and CEO of Immunize.org, a vaccination advocacy group.

How safe is the air? Nobody knows

More than half of U.S. counties have no system in place for monitoring air quality, according to Penn State researchers. Rural counties in the South and Midwest in particular were less likely to have an air-monitoring site, according to a new paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Those counties are home to roughly 50 million Americans, or about 15% of the country’s total population. 

While many rural counties may enjoy cleaner air than the typical American city, the paper notes that monitoring across the entire country is increasingly necessary due to higher frequencies of wildfires that can impact air quality hundreds of miles away. Low air quality, the study notes, is associated with a host of health issues including cardiovascular disease and reduced cognitive functioning. 

That news became public the day before a separate paper in JAMA Network Open that showed a link between traffic-related air pollution and insulin resistance could be partially explained by higher BMI and BMI growth. 

Has ‘government word search’ cast a chill on cutting-edge science?

The Harvard biostatistician John Quackenbush suspects that one of his recent NIH grant proposals is “caught in limbo” before the agency’s scientific reviewers due to increased scrutiny of topics the Trump administration considers to be controversial. 

The grants, he wrote in a new First Opinion piece, may have been held up due to the presence of words like “sex” and “female” — which would be ironic, he notes, given that the administration “insists there are only two biological sexes.”

“At best, new methods and potentially lifesaving developments will be delayed significantly while I search for alternative funding and try to overcome the substantial expertise I will lose if I have to lay off members of my team and stop accepting new trainees,” Quackenbush wrote. “At worst, the new tools we have been working on will never be completed.”

What we’re reading

• RFK Jr.’s autism study to amass medical records of many Americans, CBS

• He has my eyes and my laugh. What if he has my depression, too? The Cut

• ‘Taking the side of cancer’: the war on medical research is being fought through contracts, Splinter

• Exclusive: a Nature analysis signals the beginnings of a US science brain drain, Nature

• MN Republicans introduce vaccine criminalization bill drafted by Florida hypnotist, News from the States