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Yahoo
05-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Trump Admin's Disturbing Changes On LGBTQ+ Health Data Are Worrying Medical Experts
Members of the LGBTQ+ community, and transgender people in particular, are currently facing a massive blackout of crucial health information and scientific research. Following a flurry of executive orders from President Donald Trump, webpages on topics like LGBTQ+ health and safety were removed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. The CDC has reportedly also sought to rid new scientific papers of terms such as 'LGBT' and 'pregnant person.' And HuffPost recently reported on how the Trump administration formally blocked gender-affirming care for people under the age of 19 who are on federally run insurance programs. Naturally, these moves have led to intense scrutiny from scientists and the general public. Some CDC resources were put back online following public outcry, including AtlasPlus, which is a disease surveillance Dr. Stacy De-Lin, the associate medical director at Planned Parenthood Hudson Peconic in New York, said webpages are now stripped of certain terms and information. Experts told HuffPost that they're concerned about these moves, and about the health and safety of queer people. Below, De-Lin and other doctors share their thoughts about what's going on and where people can still access important health information. 'I just want to point out as a physician, none of these decisions are in any way based in science,' De-Lin said. 'This is politically motivated, and it is discrimination against a group of people.' When it comes to gender-affirming care specifically, decades' worth of research indicates that health decisions are 'best left to patients, their families and their doctors,' De-Lin said. 'Lawmakers should not have any say in people's personal medical decisions,' she argued. Restricting care or removing certain words from a federal health website not only discounts years and years of research, but jeopardizes patient safety, according to De-Lin. 'We know, medically, that there's not just two genders,' she said. 'There's a broad spectrum, including intersex people.' De-Lin added: 'We know transgender, nonbinary, intersex, gender-nonconforming people will continue to exist. Trans people have always existed and always will, and legislating without having just a basic understanding of sex and gender is only going to harm people who need care.' Not having a reliable and reputable source for information — which is what the CDC is, for physicians and others — can be dangerous, and experts are worried that the Trump administration's moves may result in poorer treatment for marginalized groups. 'There are a lot of knowledge gaps with many health care providers when it comes to the unique aspects of trans health care, and unfortunately that leads to a lot of stigmatization,' said Dr. Eric Burnett, an internal medicine doctor at an academic medical center in New York and a health communicator on social media. 'A lot of trans people don't feel safe going to the doctor,' Burnett added. Plus, the majority of doctors aren't members of the LGBTQ+ community, said Dr. Janine Zee-Cheng, a pediatrician in Indiana. In Indiana, 'where the small towns tend to be pretty homogenous, if you have a minoritized community of any kind, they're going to stick out like a sore thumb already,' Zee-Cheng said, adding that 'they're going to be treated differently' and 'potentially worse' than those in the majority population. If certain groups ― in this case, the LGBTQ+ population ― don't feel safe getting care, the health of the community as a whole will get worse, said Zee-Cheng. If a queer person goes in for an annual physical and feels dismissed or mistreated, they may be less inclined to go back to the doctor when they have a new problem like pain or breathing trouble. Of course, doctors can look for information in places other than the CDC website, but that could take more time, Zee-Cheng added. 'If each doctor has to look up stuff for an additional 20 minutes per day, multiply that by the number of doctors in your city — that is that many hours wasted,' Zee-Cheng said. 'It's going to be such a huge [depletion] just from a time and resource standpoint.' In the medical field, doctor and nurse burnout is already common. Having to do extra research to get an answer that used to be readily available could make that burnout even worse, Zee-Cheng noted. Experts also say the removal of important health resources can severely affect vulnerable populations. For example, 'a lot of the HIV resources got pulled down, and that's obviously very detrimental because you really can't talk about certain aspects of health without talking about health care disparities and how certain conditions, certain diseases, disproportionately affect certain groups,' such as gay men, trans women, African Americans and Latinos, Burnett said. 'Those are just medical facts. But then if you consider that 'DEI' or if you consider that 'woke, radical gender ideology,' you're going to remove our ability as physicians to target resources to at-risk communities,' Burnett added, using an abbreviation for diversity, equity and inclusion. 'That's going to leave those communities at even more of a disadvantage than they already are,' he said. 'It frustrates me as a physician because these communities are already struggling, already facing challenges, and the administration gutting all of this information makes it that much more difficult.' Zee-Cheng said young people's mental health will suffer as a result of the administration's moves. That includes suicide rates and depression, as well as mental health outcomes throughout their lives, the pediatrician said. Or it could impact how a child performs at school, interacts with their peers or their ability to go to college, Zee-Cheng said. A 2024 report from the Trevor Project nonprofit said that '39% of LGBTQ+ young people seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year — including 46% of transgender and nonbinary young people.' And according to a now-unavailable page on the Census Bureau's website, a 2022 survey found that 'Half of LGBT respondents ages 18-29 reported symptoms of depression, compared with about 29% of non-LGBT respondents in this age group.' 'One thing I really want to make sure that people are aware of is that Trump does not have the power to unilaterally strip people of their rights,' said De-Lin. Following an executive order on halting federal support for gender-affirming care among minors, some hospitals moved to restrict such care. De-Lin said she's disappointed to see this happening, adding that there is no reason for hospitals to comply right now. 'These orders definitely take time to put into action. They don't override the rights and protections that the Constitution holds, or federal law or court decision,' De-Lin said. 'I think everyone is really feeling very dizzied and very panicked.' At health care providers like Planned Parenthood, there are doctors 'who are continuing to proudly provide gender-affirming care to our LGBTQ+ people who come to our centers, and that's not changing,' she said. 'I'll just say that at Planned Parenthood, we absolutely will not be complying in advance,' De-Lin said. 'We will continue to fight and advocate for our patients.' Still, Burnett urged people not to be complacent. 'We have to take lessons from the communities that came before us, specifically with the HIV/AIDS epidemic where groups like ACT UP [the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power] and queer activists didn't just sit and take it. They stood up and they fought for their friends, for their family that were dying of AIDS because the government inaction was killing them,' Burnett said. 'I think we're back in that mindset where we're not going to let the government try to erase queer people. ... I think this shows that if you have enough public activism, if you have enough outcry, it can actually impact policy.' The federal government may be restricting the use of certain words on its websites, but this doesn't mean that local and state health departments can't use those terms, Burnett said. For people in some states and cities, local health departments have sections of their own websites that cover the information stripped from the CDC site. 'I know in New York City, the New York City Department of Health [and Mental Hygiene] has a really robust sexual health division,' Burnett said. 'I also just encourage people to go to their state and local health department websites, and often they will have resources there and local resources that are easily accessible to people within the community.' But with queer rights under attack throughout the country, local health departments won't always be a reliable place to get information on LGBTQ+ health care. (Of course, a person in any state can learn from the general health resources on the New York City site, for example; any information on local doctors or local programs just won't apply to them.) In those cases, Burnett recommended visiting the Human Rights Campaign website to find resources for the queer community and information for providers who treat members of this group. Burnett also suggested checking out the Trans Health Project, an initiative of the Advocates for Trans Equality organization. De-Lin said she refers people to the Planned Parenthood website for resources on LGBTQ+ health and gender-affirming care. And if you have a doctor or medical center in your community that you already trust, continue to talk with them, Zee-Cheng said. 'I know it's easy to look at this and feel extraordinarily dejected and that you're not worthy, and that you don't matter, but I think there are more people out there who support you and want what's best for you,' said Burnett. 'Speaking from personal perspective, I'm going to keep fighting until I until I can't anymore. I'm just going to keep going. And there are people out there who are fighting, especially within the health care community, to ensure that that we don't take this lying down.' If you or someone you know needs help, call or text 988 or chat for mental health support. Additionally, you can find local mental health and crisis resources at Outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention. RFK Jr.'s Stunning Claim About Black People And Vaccines Sparks Concern From Medical Experts Experts Share What Another Trump Presidency Could Mean For Your Health 109 Ways To Fight Back Against What's Happening In The U.S. Right Now
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
CDC websites, datasets taken down as agency complies with Trump executive order
Several US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention websites and datasets related to HIV, LGBTQ people, youth health behaviors and more have been removed after the agency was directed to comply with an executive order from President Donald Trump. Trump's order, 'Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,' requires the federal government to recognize two sexes: male and female. A January 29 memo from the US Office of Personnel Management directs agency heads to remove 'all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts, etc.) that inculcate or promote gender ideology' by 5 p.m. Friday. CNN has reached out to the White House about the memo. A senior health official told CNN that staff were told that consequences for noncompliance could be severe. Removal of the language will take time, the official added, so the sites and information were taken down in order to comply. 'In the process, large swaths of data and science will be unavailable for an undetermined period,' the senior health official said. 'Regardless of your comfort with the idea of trans people, you should be terrified that the government is purging truth and science to fit an ideology, because what's next?' As of Friday afternoon, several CDC pages related to HIV are down, including the CDC's HIV index page, testing page, datasets, national surveillance reports and causes pages. Many of the CDC's sites related to LGBTQ youth were also removed, including pages that mentioned LGBT children's risk of suicide, those focused on creating safe schools for LGBTQ youth and a page focused on health disparities among LGBTQ youth. The site for the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System — a long-running survey that tracks health behaviors among high school students in the United States — says 'The page you're looking for was not found.' A page about food safety during pregnancy called 'Safer Food Choices for Pregnant People' was also removed. Also down is AtlasPlus, an interactive tool that lets users analyze CDC data on HIV, STDs, TB and viral hepatitis, and the CDC's Social Vulnerability Index, data that helps researchers and public policy leaders identify communities that are vulnerable to the effects of disasters and public health emergencies. Asked about the changes, a CDC spokesperson referred questions to the US Department of Health and Human Services. Last week, the Trump administration directed federal health agencies, including the CDC, to pause external communications through February 1. HHS has previously told CNN that there will be exceptions for 'mission critical' announcements made on a case-by-case basis. HHS did not respond to requests for information about the CDC sites. Leaders of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association said Friday that access to CDC information is crucial for health-care providers. Timely, accurate information is 'essential for controlling infections and safeguarding health,' they said in a statement. 'The removal of HIV- and LGBTQ-related resources from the websites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies is deeply concerning and creates a dangerous gap in scientific information and data to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks,' Dr. Tina Tan, president of the IDSA, and Dr. Colleen Kelley, chair of the HIVMA, said in a statement. As pages started to come down, scholars and activists on social media have encouraged others to archive CDC data. In a letter to Acting HHS Secretary Dr. Dorothy Fink and Acting CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez, the Association of Health Care Journalists requested that the sites be restored immediately. The missing datasets are 'crucial' for informing the public about issues such as 'smoking, vaping, drinking, eating, exercise, and sexual behavior,' the association's leaders wrote in the letter. CNN's Sandee LaMotte contributed to this report.
CNN
31-01-2025
- Health
- CNN
CDC websites, datasets taken down as agency complies with Trump executive order
Several US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention websites and datasets related to HIV, LGBTQ people, youth health behaviors and more have been removed after the agency was directed to comply with an executive order from President Donald Trump. Trump's order, 'Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,' requires the federal government to recognize two sexes: male and female. A January 29 memo from the US Office of Personnel Management directs agency heads to remove 'all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts, etc.) that inculcate or promote gender ideology' by 5 p.m. Friday. CNN has reached out to the White House about the memo. A senior health official told CNN that staff were told that consequences for noncompliance could be severe. Removal of the language will take time, the official added, so the sites and information were taken down in order to comply. 'In the process, large swaths of data and science will be unavailable for an undetermined period,' the senior health official said. 'Regardless of your comfort with the idea of trans people, you should be terrified that the government is purging truth and science to fit an ideology, because what's next?' As of Friday afternoon, several CDC pages related to HIV are down, including the CDC's HIV index page, testing page, datasets, national surveillance reports and causes pages. Many of the CDC's sites related to LGBTQ youth were also removed, including pages that mentioned LGBT children's risk of suicide, those focused on creating safe schools for LGBTQ youth and a page focused on health disparities among LGBTQ youth. The site for the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System — a long-running survey that tracks health behaviors among high school students in the United States — says 'The page you're looking for was not found.' A page about food safety during pregnancy called 'Safer Food Choices for Pregnant People' was also removed. Also down is AtlasPlus, an interactive tool that lets users analyze CDC data on HIV, STDs, TB and viral hepatitis, and the CDC's Social Vulnerability Index, data that helps researchers and public policy leaders identify communities that are vulnerable to the effects of disasters and public health emergencies. Asked about the changes, a CDC spokesperson referred questions to the US Department of Health and Human Services. Last week, the Trump administration directed federal health agencies, including the CDC, to pause external communications through February 1. HHS has previously told CNN that there will be exceptions for 'mission critical' announcements made on a case-by-case basis. HHS did not respond to requests for information about the CDC sites. Leaders of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association said Friday that access to CDC information is crucial for health-care providers. Timely, accurate information is 'essential for controlling infections and safeguarding health,' they said in a statement. 'The removal of HIV- and LGBTQ-related resources from the websites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies is deeply concerning and creates a dangerous gap in scientific information and data to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks,' Dr. Tina Tan, president of the IDSA, and Dr. Colleen Kelley, chair of the HIVMA, said in a statement. Get CNN Health's weekly newsletter Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Friday from the CNN Health team. As pages started to come down, scholars and activists on social media have encouraged others to archive CDC data. In a letter to Acting HHS Secretary Dr. Dorothy Fink and Acting CDC Director Dr. Susan Monarez, the Association of Health Care Journalists requested that the sites be restored immediately. The missing datasets are 'crucial' for informing the public about issues such as 'smoking, vaping, drinking, eating, exercise, and sexual behavior,' the association's leaders wrote in the letter. CNN's Sandee LaMotte contributed to this report.
Cedar News
31-01-2025
- Health
- Cedar News
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sites or datasets were scrubbed as of Friday afternoon
Join our Telegram 'Axios: 'The following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sites or datasets were scrubbed as of Friday afternoon. It's not immediately clear what day they were removed.' – the Youth Risk Behavior Survey – AtlasPlus, which housed HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis and STD information – A contraception page for health care providers – A page on ending gender-based violence – Evidence supporting recommendations for HPV vaccination harmonization across genders, ages 22 through 26 years – Heart disease death rates by gender, by county, Florida -Information about transgender and gender diverse people.
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
CDC Data Is Disappearing
Last night, scientists began to hear cryptic and foreboding warnings from colleagues: Go to the CDC website, and download your data now. They were all telling one another the same thing: Data on the website were about to disappear, or be altered, to comply with the Trump administration's ongoing attempt to scrub federal agencies of any mention of gender, DEI, and accessibility. 'I was up until 2 a.m.,' Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan who relies on the CDC's data to track viral outbreaks, told me. She archived whatever she could. What they feared quickly came to pass. Already, content from the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, which includes data from a national survey, has disappeared; so have parts of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry's Social Vulnerability Index and the Environmental Justice Index. The CDC's landing page for HIV data has also vanished. And the agency's AtlasPlus tool, which contains nearly 20 years of CDC surveillance data on HIV, hepatitis, sexually transmitted infections, and tuberculosis, is down. Several scientists I talked with told me they had heard directly from contacts at the CDC that the agency has directed employees to scrub any mention of 'gender' from its site and the data that it shares there, replacing it with 'sex.' The full scope of the purge isn't yet clear. One document obtained by The Atlantic indicated that the government was, as of yesterday evening, intending to target and replace, at a minimum, several 'suggested keywords'—including 'pregnant people, transgender, binary, non-binary, gender, assigned at birth, binary [sic], non-binary [sic], cisgender, queer, gender identity, gender minority, anything with pronouns'—in CDC content. While these terms are often politicized, some represent demographic variables that researchers collect when tracking the ebb and flow of diseases and health conditions across populations. Should they be reworded, or even removed entirely, from data sets to comply with the executive order, researchers and health-care providers might have a much harder time figuring out how diseases affect specific communities—making it more challenging to serve Americans on the whole. CDC data's 'explicit purpose' is to guide researchers toward the places and people who most need attention, Patrick Sullivan, an epidemiologist at Emory University and a former CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, told me. As the changes unfold before him, he said, 'it's hard to understand how this benefits health.' When I contacted the CDC, a spokesperson redirected my requests for comment to the Department of Health and Human Services, which did not respond. The government appears to understand that these changes could have scientific implications: The document directing a review of CDC content suggests that some work could be altered without 'changing the meaning or scientific integrity of the content,' and that any such changes should be considered 'routine.' Changing other content, according to the document, would require review by an expert precisely because any alterations would risk scientific integrity. But the document does not specify how data would be sorted into those categories, or at whose discretion. 'My fear is that in the short term, entire data sets would be taken down,' then reappear with demographic variables removed or altered to conform with DEI restrictions, Katie Biello, an epidemiologist at Brown, told me. Excising mention of gender and sexual orientation, for instance, from public-health data sets could require stripping entire columns of data out. If the government chooses to define sex as binary, transgender people and nonbinary people, among others, could be effectively erased. In response to the ongoing changes, some groups of researchers are now rushing to archive the CDC website in full. Acknowledging and addressing health differences among demographic groups is a basic epidemiological tenet, Biello told me, 'so we know where to target our health interventions.' She pointed to examples in her own field: Gay men have higher rates of STIs, but lower rates of obesity; transgender women have higher rates of HIV, but lower rates of prostate cancer. More broadly, demographic changes to data sets could limit the country's ability to identify which Americans are most at risk from an expansive list of conditions including adolescent depression, STIs, even sex-specific cancers. Changing data sets in this way would be tantamount to 'erasing our ability to use data and evidence' to care for people, Rachel Hardeman, a health-equity expert at the University of Minnesota, told me. Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown, pointed to mpox as a recent example of how replacing 'gender' with 'sex,' or ignoring sexual orientation, could limit effective public-health responses. At the beginning of the United States' 2022 outbreak, neither researchers nor the public had much clarity on who was most affected, leading to widespread panic. 'Officials were talking about the situation as if it was a risk we equally faced,' Nuzzo said. By collecting detailed demographic information, researchers were able to show that the disease was primarily affecting men who have sex with men, allowing officials to more efficiently allocate resources, including vaccines, and bring the epidemic under control before it affected Americans more widely. A scrub such as this could also change how the government allocates funds for long-standing threats to public health, which could widen health-equity gaps, or reverse progress in combatting them. Rates of STIs more generally have recently begun to plateau in the U.S., after decades of steady increase—but altering data that focus interventions on, say, transgender populations, or men who have sex with men, could undo those gains. If no data exist to prove that a health issue concentrates within a particular community, that 'provides a justification to cut funding,' one researcher told me. (Several scientists who spoke with me for this article requested anonymity, for fear of retaliation for speaking out about the loss of federal data.) Sullivan, whose work focuses on HIV surveillance, compared the government's actions to, effectively, destroying the road map to determining who in America most needs screening, pre-exposure prophylaxis, and treatment. Much of the data on the CDC website have been aggregated from states, so it would be possible for researchers to reassemble those data sets, Nuzzo pointed out. But that's an onerous task, and several scientists told me they never thought they'd be in a position where they'd have to scramble to squirrel away publicly available federal data. Nuzzo also worried that states might be reluctant in the future to share data with the federal government, or might decide not to bother collecting certain data at all. On the most basic scientific level, changing federal-government data means those data become unreliable. Public-health data are collected with the intention of sussing out which populations most need health interventions; altering those data leaves behind a skewed portrait of reality. Article originally published at The Atlantic
