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Carbon monoxide poisoning is suspected in several traveler deaths. Here's how to stay safe on your next trip

Carbon monoxide poisoning is suspected in several traveler deaths. Here's how to stay safe on your next trip

CNN03-04-2025
Carbon monoxide, often called the 'silent killer,' has no taste, odor or color, yet prolonged inhalation of the invisible gas has been tied to the recent deaths of several American tourists traveling abroad.
In March, 14-year-old Miller Gardner, son of former New York Yankees player Brett Gardner, died on a family vacation at a Costa Rica beach resort. A month prior, three American women were discovered dead in their Belize hotel room. In both cases, authorities have said carbon monoxide poisoning caused the deaths.
While many homes in the U.S. are equipped with alarms that detect the presence of the dangerous gas, travelers may need to take extra precautions to limit their exposure on the road.
Carbon monoxide is produced when natural gas is burned in appliances like boilers, pool heaters, gas stoves, fireplaces and dryers, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
'Every carbon monoxide producing appliance is designed to take those toxic fuels out of the building,' said Charon McNabb, founder of the National Carbon Monoxide Awareness Foundation.
Without regular maintenance, McNabb said venting systems can corrode or shift, creating leak pathways for carbon monoxide to remain trapped indoors. The gas is then capable of traveling into nearby rooms through drywall, doors and air ducts.
A buildup of carbon monoxide in the air can diminish your ability to absorb oxygen, resulting in serious or fatal tissue damage to the brain, heart and muscles.
According to a 2019 study published in the journal Preventive Medicine Reports, 905 U.S. lodging guests were poisoned by carbon monoxide from 2005 to 2018, resulting in 22 deaths.
In the U.S., requirements for carbon monoxide detectors in homes and hotels differ by state, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
While vacation rental platforms like VRBO and Airbnb only require listed units to meet local regulations, owners can indicate whether a carbon monoxide alarm is present on the property within their listings.
McNabb advises travelers booking accommodations to call ahead of their stay to check for the presence of detectors in each guest room and ask about the location of their room within the building.
'Travelers may want to stay away from (rooms next to) pools and pool heaters because typically, the chemicals for the pools are kept in the mechanical room where the heater is stored, and those chemicals can corrode the metal much quicker, creating leak paths,' McNabb said, adding that rooms on higher floors can also provide a safer distance from gas-powered yard equipment.
'If you're not totally confident in the answers you get, play it safe and bring your own (carbon monoxide) alarm,' McNabb said.
Portable alarms are battery or outlet powered, pocket-sized devices capable of monitoring CO levels and alerting the user of unsafe levels. TSA permits travelling with carbon monoxide alarms, but lithium batteries should be taken out of the device and placed in carry-on luggage.
Kos Galatsis, CEO of Forensics Detectors, which sells air quality monitoring devices, suggests travelers keep the alarm by their bedside, as many poisonings occur while stationary or sleeping.
Prices for portable CO alarms online range drastically, but the most important feature to look out for is a UL 2034 certification, which designates the device is in line with national product safety standards.
Campers should avoid using portable gas stoves, gas-powered lanterns, power generators and flameless chemical heaters inside of tents, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
This is especially important when camping in high altitudes, where the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning is increased.
Tents should also be pitched away from idling vehicles and campfire, according to the CPSC.
Initial symptoms of carbon monoxide exposure can easily be mistaken for the flu, jet lag or stomach bugs.
Signs of poisoning, according to Mayo Clinic, include:
- Dull headache
- Weakness
- Dizziness
- Nausea or vomiting
- Shortness of breath
- Confusion
- Blurred vision
- Loss of consciousness
High levels of exposure can cause symptoms such as mental confusion and loss of muscle control to develop more rapidly.
If you or fellow travelers experience any of these symptoms, seek fresh air and medical advice immediately.
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ICE sent 3 U.S. citizen children, including boy with cancer, to Honduras with their deported moms
ICE sent 3 U.S. citizen children, including boy with cancer, to Honduras with their deported moms

NBC News

time6 minutes ago

  • NBC News

ICE sent 3 U.S. citizen children, including boy with cancer, to Honduras with their deported moms

Despite being American citizens, three children — a 4-year-old boy with Stage 4 kidney cancer, his 7-year-old sister and a 2-year-old girl — were swept up along with their families by immigration authorities in Louisiana and quickly sent to Honduras, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of the families. The suit alleges that despite the government's own directives, the parents 'were never given a choice as to whether their children should be deported with them and were prohibited from contacting their counsel or having meaningful contact with their families to arrange for the care of their children.' The mothers, named in the suit as Rosario and Julia, allege they wanted their children to remain in the U.S. Instead, the families were 'illegally deported without even a semblance of due process,' the lawsuit states. Romeo, as the now 5-year-old is identified in the lawsuit, was diagnosed with a 'rare and aggressive form of kidney cancer,' at age 2. He immediately began receiving ongoing 'critical, life-saving medical treatment' in the U.S., according to the lawsuit, which was filed by immigrant advocacy group National Immigration Project and three law firms. 'The failure to allow his mother to arrange for his care, in violation of ICE's own directive, and his unlawful deportation to Honduras interfered with his needed medical treatment,' the suit said. The suit was filed on behalf of the two mothers and their children in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana on July 31. The plaintiffs' names in the lawsuit are pseudonyms to protect their identities and safety, attorneys said. The case against the federal government is in its early stages, and plaintiffs are seeking a jury trial and damages, and for their arrests and removals to be found unlawful and to be returned to the United States. 'This is emblematic of what happens when the administration is laser-focused on deportation, that when the end result is all that matters, you are going to end up with wrongful and unlawful deportations,' Stephanie Alvarez-Jones, an attorney with the National Immigration Project, told NBC News. The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that U.S. children were not being 'deported' and denied that the parents were not given a choice regarding the care of their children before being sent to Honduras. 'Rather than separate their families, ICE asked the mothers if they wanted to be removed with their children or if they wanted ICE to place the children with someone safe the parent designates,' Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said. 'The parents in this instance made the determination to take their children with them back to Honduras.' McLaughlin said that when there is 'an underlying health issue, ICE makes sure that treatment is available in the country to which the illegal alien is being removed. The implication that ICE would deny a child the medical care they need is flatly FALSE, and it is an insult to the men and women of federal law enforcement.' NBC News has previously reported on U.S. citizen children being sent with their deported immigrant parents to other countries, including a 10-year-old girl recovering from a rare brain tumor sent to Mexico. Rosario and Julia and their children were put on a plane to Honduras on April 25 after being detained at immigration check-in appointments where they were told to bring their U.S. citizen children and their passports, according to the lawsuit. Both women had settled in the U.S. some years ago, the lawsuit states. Rosario came to the U.S. in 2013 as a 13-year-old unaccompanied minor. 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California providers see ‘chilling effect' if Trump ban on immigrant benefits is upheld
California providers see ‘chilling effect' if Trump ban on immigrant benefits is upheld

Los Angeles Times

timean hour ago

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California providers see ‘chilling effect' if Trump ban on immigrant benefits is upheld

If the Trump administration succeeds in barring undocumented immigrants from federally funded 'public benefit' programs, vulnerable children and families across California would suffer greatly, losing access to emergency shelters, vital healthcare, early education and life-saving nutritional support, according to state and local officials who filed their opposition to the changes in federal court. The new restrictions would harm undocumented immigrants but also U.S. citizens — including the U.S.-born children of immigrants and people suffering from mental illness and homelessness who lack documentation — and put intense stress on the state's emergency healthcare system, the officials said. Head Start, which provides tens of thousands of children in the state with early education, healthcare and nutritional support, may have to shutter some of its programs if the new rules barring immigrants withstand a lawsuit filed by California and other liberal-led states, officials said. 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COVID Revenge Is Supercharging the Anti-Vaccine Agenda
COVID Revenge Is Supercharging the Anti-Vaccine Agenda

Atlantic

time2 hours ago

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COVID Revenge Is Supercharging the Anti-Vaccine Agenda

Four and a half years ago, fresh off the success of Operation Warp Speed, mRNA vaccines were widely considered—as President Donald Trump said in December 2020 —a 'medical miracle.' Last week, the United States government decidedly reversed that stance when Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. canceled nearly half a billion dollars' worth of grants and contracts for mRNA-vaccine research. With Kennedy leading HHS, this about-face is easy to parse as yet another anti-vaccine move. But the assault on mRNA is also proof of another kind of animus: the COVID-revenge campaign that top officials in this administration have been pursuing for months, attacking the policies, technologies, and people that defined the U.S.'s pandemic response. As the immediacy of the COVID crisis receded, public anger about the American response to it took deeper root—perhaps most prominently among some critics who are now Trump appointees. That acrimony has become an essential tool in Kennedy's efforts to undermine vaccines. 'It is leverage,' Dorit Reiss, a vaccine-law expert at UC Law San Francisco, told me. 'It is a way to justify doing things that he wouldn't be able to get away with otherwise.' COVID revenge has defined the second Trump administration's health policy from the beginning. Kennedy and his allies have ousted prominent HHS officials who played key roles in the development of COVID policy, as well as scientists at the National Institutes of Health, including close colleagues of Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (and, according to Trump, an idiot and a 'disaster'). In June, Kennedy dismissed every member of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which has helped shape COVID-vaccine recommendations, and handpicked replacements for them. HHS and ACIP are now stacked with COVID contrarians who have repeatedly criticized COVID policies and minimized the benefits of vaccines. Under pressure from Trump officials, the NIH has terminated funding for hundreds of COVID-related grants. The president and his appointees have espoused the highly disputed notion that COVID began as a leak from 'an unsafe lab in Wuhan, China'—and cited the NIH's funding of related research as a reason to restrict federal agencies' independent grant-awarding powers. This administration is rapidly rewriting the narrative of COVID vaccines as well. In an early executive order, Trump called for an end to COVID-19-vaccine mandates in schools, even though few remained; earlier this month, HHS rolled back a Biden-era policy that financially rewarded hospitals for reporting staff-vaccination rates, describing the policy as ' coercive.' The FDA has made it harder for manufacturers to bring new COVID shots to market, narrowed who can get the Novavax shot, and approved the Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for only a limited group of children, over the objections of agency experts. For its part, the CDC softened its COVID-shot guidance for pregnant people and children, after Kennedy—who has described the shots as 'the deadliest vaccine ever made'—tried to unilaterally remove it. Experts told me they fear that what access remains to the shots for children and adults could still be abolished; so could COVID-vaccine manufacturers' current protection from liability. (Andrew Nixon, an HHS spokesperson, said in an email that the department would not comment on potential regulatory changes.) The latest assault against mRNA vaccines, experts told me, is difficult to disentangle from the administration's pushback on COVID shots—which, because of the pandemic, the public now views as synonymous with the technology, Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health, told me. Kennedy justified the mRNA cuts by suggesting—in contrast to a wealth of evidence—that the vaccines' risks outweigh their benefits, and that they 'fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.' And he insisted, without proof, that mRNA vaccines prolong pandemics. Meanwhile, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya argued that the cancellations were driven by a lack of public trust in the technology itself. In May, the Trump administration also pulled more than $700 million in funds from Moderna that had initially been awarded to develop mRNA-based flu vaccines. The mRNA funding terminated so far came from HHS's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority; multiple NIH officials told me that they anticipate that similar grant cuts will follow at their agency. (In an email, Kush Desai, a spokesperson for the White House, defended the administration's decision as a way to prioritize funding with 'the most untapped potential'; Nixon echoed that sentiment, casting the decision as 'a necessary pivot in how we steward public health innovations in vaccines.') COVID is a politically convenient entryway to broader anti-vaccine sentiment. COVID shots are among the U.S.'s most politicized vaccines, and many Republicans have, since the outbreak's early days, been skeptical of COVID-mitigation policies. Although most Americans remain supportive of vaccines on the whole, most Republicans—and many Democrats—say they're no longer keen on getting more COVID shots. 'People trust the COVID vaccines less,' Nuzzo told me, which makes it easy for the administration's vaccine opponents to use attacks on those vaccines as purchase for broader assaults. For all their COVID-centric hype, mRNA vaccines have long been under development for many unrelated diseases. And experts now worry that the blockades currently in place for certain types of mRNA vaccines could soon extend to other, similar technologies, including mRNA-based therapies in development for cancer and genetic disease, which might not make it through the approval process at Kennedy's FDA. (Nixon said HHS would continue to invest in mRNA research for cancer and other complex diseases.) Casting doubt on COVID shots makes other vaccines that have been vetted in the same way—and found to be safe and effective, based on high-quality data—look dubious. 'Once you establish that it's okay to override something for COVID,' Reiss told me, 'it's much easier to say, 'Well, now we're going to unrecommend MMR.'' (Kennedy's ACIP plans to review the entire childhood-immunization schedule and assess its cumulative effects.) Plenty of other avenues remain for Kennedy to play on COVID discontent—fear of the shots' side effects, distaste for mandates, declining trust in public health and medical experts —to pull back the government's support for vaccination. He has announced, for instance, his intention to reform the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which helps protect manufacturers from lawsuits over illegitimate claims about a vaccine's health effects, and his plans to find 'ways to enlarge that program so that COVID-vaccine-injured people can be compensated.' Some of the experts I spoke with fear that the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee—the agency's rough equivalent of ACIP—could be remade in Kennedy's vision. The administration has also been very willing to rescind federal funding from universities in order to forward its own ideas: Kennedy could, perhaps, threaten to withhold money from universities that require any vaccines for students. Kennedy has also insisted that 'we need to stop trusting the experts'—that Americans, for instance, shouldn't have been discouraged from doing their own research during the pandemic. He could use COVID as an excuse to make that maxim Americans' reality: Many public-health and infectious-disease-focused professional societies rely on at least some degree of federal funding, Nirav D. Shah, a former principal deputy director of the CDC, told me. Stripping those resources would be 'a way to cut their legs off'—or, at the very least, would further delegitimize those expert bodies in the public eye. Kennedy has already barred representatives from professional societies, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, from participating in ACIP subcommittees after those two societies and others collectively sued HHS over its shifts in COVID policy. The public fight between medicine and government is now accelerating the nation onto a path where advice diverges over not just COVID shots but vaccines generally. (When asked about how COVID resentment was guiding the administration's decisions, Desai said that the media had politicized science to push for pandemic-era mandates and that The Atlantic 'continues to fundamentally misunderstand how the Trump administration is reversing this COVID era politicization of HHS.') The coronavirus pandemic began during the first Trump presidency; now its legacy is being exploited by a second one. Had the pandemic never happened, Kennedy would likely still be attacking vaccines, maybe even from the same position of power he currently commands. But without the lightning rod of COVID, Kennedy's attacks would be less effective. Already, one clear consequence of the Trump administration's anti-COVID campaign is that it will leave the nation less knowledgeable about and less prepared against all infectious diseases, Gregory Poland, a vaccinologist and the president of Atria Research Institute, told me. That might be the Trump administration's ultimate act of revenge. No matter who is in charge when the U.S. meets its next crisis, those leaders may be forced into a corner carved out by Trump and Kennedy—one from which the country must fight disease without adequate vaccination, research, or public-health expertise. This current administration will have left the nation with few other options.

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