Emily Treleaven

CDC reports 216 child deaths this flu season, the most in 15 years More U.S. children have died this flu season than at any time since the swine flu pandemic 15 years ago.

Each child death is an immense tragedy. Dr. Sean O’Leary highlights declining flu vaccination rates are contributing to the highest rate of child flu deaths in 15 years.

“There are likely several contributors to this season’s severity, but

A big one is that fewer children are getting flu shots.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr will require all new vaccines to undergo placebo testing, WaPo reports U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr intends to shift the way vaccines are tested, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday, citing a spokesperson from the HHS.

Just to be clear, this is a violation of the fundamental ethical principle in clinical trial design called "equipoise."

Equipoise means that no-one is exposed to excess risk just to test the therapy. That's specifically *why* vaccine trials don't use placebo arms.

Ethical violation as POLICY.

🧵1/N New study published in @jama.com on re-emergence of vaccine-eliminated infectious diseases under declining vaccination in the US. We model long-term risk and conditions for return to endemicity for measles, rubella, polio, & diphtheria. Collab w/ @Mathewkiang.com jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

U.S. Terminates Funding for Polio, H.I.V., Malaria and Nutrition Programs Around the World Here are some of the 5,800 contracts the Trump administration formally canceled this week in a wave of terse emails.

“People will die,” said Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, executive director of the African Population and Health Research Center, “but we will never know, because even the programs to count the dead are cut.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/27/h...

Sec. Kennedy, you're incorrect. This *is* an unusual year for measles. This year has already passed 8 out of the past 15 years' *annual* counts. And we are only 2.5 months into 2025.

Rather than falsehoods, you should publicly state support for MMR. Today marks the first measles death in 10 years.

HIV Development Assistance and Adult Mortality in Africa To determine the effects of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), Bendavid and coauthors conducted analyses of adult mortality using person-level data from the Demographic and He...

Surreal read of the day: a paper using USAID-funded and now terminated Demographic & Health Surveys to count the huge number of lives saved by the now frozen US PEPFAR program to fight HIV, co-authored by current US admin’s nominee to lead cuts in health research

jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

How Trump’s Medical Research Cuts Would Hit Colleges and Hospitals in Every State (Gift Article) Changes to a key funding formula will reduce research grants at hospitals and universities by billions — and may discourage future research.

NIH's proposal to cut the grants it pays for medical research will not just hurt elite coastal universities.

Who else has a lot at stake? The states of Missouri and North Carolina. The University of Texas Cancer Center. Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

"If groups and individuals impacted by [Trump's] proposed closures follow the playbook used by those who thwarted Nixon’s attempt to shutter [the Office of Economic Opportunity], Trump and Musk probably will run into the same fate," writes LaRochelle in this @time.com OpEd.

Learn more. ⤵️

Sharing this in case anyone has more info

I proudly support the University of Michigan's stated core values.

thank you @karagavin.bsky.social for this beautifully written piece that can help scientists like us explain what is really at stake and why so many of us do what we do and #GoBlue

NIH In Your State - United For Medical Research Select a state on the map to see the impact of NIH funding across America.

An excellent resource on the economic impact of NIH funding in the U.S. with an interactive link for state specific information here:

www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/nih-in-your-...

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%.

I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters.

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

Opinion | The World’s Richest Men Take On the World’s Poorest Children (Gift Article) I’ve seen U.S.A.I.D. operate around the world, and it’s not woke — it’s lifesaving.

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/o...

According to the article, some of the trials abruptly put on hold:

Critical and moving story by @stephanienolen.bsky.social, children, teenagers, adults all over the world, left in the lurch, abandoned by the reckless abandonment of USAID clinical trials.

It looks like the NOFO pages on other NICHD branches are also down, whatever that means.

Topics - EPI Library The EPI Data Library offers comprehensive, up-to-date labor data from Economic Policy Institute analysis, covering wages, inequality, and economic trends across demographics.

DATA RELEASE WHEN DATA FEELS SCARCE!
Check out data.epi.org -a data repository with 78,000+ series on topics like employment, wages, poverty, and inequality. You can get many measures by gender, race and state!

I've been working with our @epi.org team to build this and am so proud of the result

‘Gender Ideology’ Ban is Already Harming Health, Experts Say (Gift Article) Documents purged from government websites include guidelines for safe contraception and information on racial inequities in health care.

SCOOP: Many of the pages that went missing on Friday from the CDC website on Friday have reappeared — in response to intense media coverage, backlash from the scientific community and concern for the public’s health.

www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/h...

CDC datasets uploaded before January 28th, 2025 by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Topics cdc, government, united states, dataset, archive Language English Item Size 98.5G An archive of all CDC datasets uploaded to https://data.cdc.gov/browse before January 28th, 2025. Excludes corrupt datasets and data not publicly accessible.

The entire archive of all CDC datasets uploaded before January 28th, 2025 has been backed up on Internet Archive.

Incredible work everyone. Science will never be silenced!

Family with young child in Nepal

With a new R01, @emilytreleaven.bsky.social will leverage multi-generational data from the Chitwan Valley Family Study #CVFS to reveal the effects of persistent disadvantage on young children's health. #UmichResearch #EpiSky #HealthEquity

psc.isr.umich.edu/news/multi-g...

Now online at Nature Human Behaviour: "Consumption Responses to an Unconditional Child Allowance in the U.S." We study how the 2021 CTC expansion affected family expenditures using observed (rather than reported) consumption data from 1.3 million establishments. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Dynamite program with an incredible group of scholars each year. Please share and encourage students to apply. 2023 cohort will be coming to #PAA2024 @popassocamerica.bsky.social