THE SET-UP: “Gold-standard science.” That’s been RFK Jr.’s mantra throughout his lamprey-like attachment to Trump’s MAGA movement. When it comes to his claims about vaccines, he’s promised to bring “gold-standard science” to bear on both the question of autism and on CDC’s recommendations for the “vaccine schedule.” He’s also promised to apply gold-standard science to the food supply. It would be a marked change from a system that he says is “captured” by powerful corporations.
It sounds good, too … by all means, let’s reclaim “the science” and dispatch all the self-interested shills. It’s an appeal that resonates across the political spectrum … and it even appeals to those who wonder why he’s so obsessed with an unsubstantiated autism theory. And that’s particularly befuddling if you’re aware of the research on other man-made catalysts that could just as easily explain what he calls “an epidemic.” Just last year another study linked bisphenol A to autism in boys. It’s ubiquitous because it’s found in plastic water bottles. And plastic water bottles became ubiquitous over the course of the 90s. Perhaps coincidently—or perhaps not coincidentally—autism also took off in the 90s.
Although it seems logical to link the sudden, widespread adoption of plastic-tainted water with the sudden spike in autism … we still don’t know. The same is true of air pollution … the evidence is both tantalizing and inconclusive. However, the evidence is strong enough to warrant further study.
What a perfect opportunity to use some that “gold-standard science!”
Right?
And therein lies the problem.
RFK Jr. is far too busy chasing wild geese from his past to see that he’s uinuqely positioned to bark up some new trees. And instead of marshalling gold-standard science, he’s been aping Elon Musk and DOGE’ing the Department of Health and Human Services. But most alarmingly of all, when he did get a chance to employ gold-standard science in a potentially game-changing report on America’s toxic food system, he produced this:
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his “Make America Healthy Again” Commission report harnesses “gold-standard” science, citing more than 500 studies and other sources to back up its claims. Those citations, though, are rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions.
Seven of the cited sources don’t appear to exist at all.
Epidemiologist Katherine Keyes is listed in the MAHA report as the first author of a study on anxiety in adolescents. When NOTUS reached out to her this week, she was surprised to hear of the citation. She does study mental health and substance use, she said. But she didn’t write the paper listed.
“The paper cited is not a real paper that I or my colleagues were involved with,” Keyes told NOTUS via email. “We’ve certainly done research on this topic, but did not publish a paper in JAMA Pediatrics on this topic with that co-author group, or with that title.”
It’s not clear that anyone wrote the study cited in the MAHA report. The citation refers to a study titled, “Changes in mental health and substance abuse among US adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic,” along with a nonfunctional link to the study’s digital object identifier. While the citation claims that the study appeared in the 12th issue of the 176th edition of the journal JAMA Pediatrics, that issue didn’t include a study with that title.
…and that, in turn, leads to some alarming conclusions…
As the Trump administration cuts research funding for federal health agencies and academic institutions and rejects the scientific consensus on issues like vaccines and gender-affirming care, the issues with its much-heralded MAHA report could indicate lessening concern for scientific accuracy at the highest levels of the federal government.
And that brings us to a trio of stories on the food supply. Bon appétit! - jp
TITLE: Silence on E. Coli Outbreak Highlights How Trump Team’s Changes Undermine Food Safety11
https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/food-safety-foodborne-illness-trump-health-agency-cuts-e-coli-outbreak-silence/
EXCERPTS: Colton George felt sick. The 9-year-old Indiana boy told his parents his stomach hurt. He kept running to the bathroom and felt too ill to finish a basketball game.
Days later, he lay in a hospital bed, fighting for his life. He had eaten tainted salad, according to a lawsuit against the lettuce grower filed by his parents on April 17 in federal court for the Southern District of Indiana.
The E. coli bacteria that ravaged Colton’s kidneys was a genetic match to the strain that killed one person and sickened nearly 90 people in 15 states last fall. Federal health agencies investigated the cases and linked them to a farm that grew romaine lettuce.
But most people have never heard about this outbreak, which a Feb. 11 internal FDA memo linked to a single lettuce processor and ranch as the source of the contamination. In what many experts said was a break with common practice, officials never issued public communications after the investigation or identified the grower who produced the lettuce.
From failing to publicize a major outbreak to scaling back safety alert specialists and rules, the Trump administration’s anti-regulatory and cost-cutting push risks unraveling a critical system that helps ensure the safety of the U.S. food supply, according to consumer advocates, researchers and former employees at the FDA and U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The investigation into the illnesses began near the end of the Biden administration but work on the lettuce outbreak wasn’t completed until Feb. 11. At that time, the decision was made by the Trump administration not to release the names of the grower and processor because the FDA said no product remained on the market.
The administration also has withdrawn a proposed regulation to reduce the presence of salmonella in raw poultry, according to an April USDA alert. It was projected to save more than $13 million annually by preventing more than 3,000 illnesses, according to the proposal.
Officials from the Department of Health and Human Services have said that food safety is a priority, and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said in an April 29 interview with the newsletter Inside Medicine that the recent job cuts would not affect agency operations.
“The FDA had 9,500 employees in 2007. Last year it was nearly 19,000. Has the 100% increase in employees increased approval times, innovation, AI, food safety, or agency morale?” Makary asked. “No, it hasn’t. In fact, it’s increased regulatory creep.”
The FDA referred questions to HHS, which declined to comment or make Makary available for an interview. In a statement, the agency said “protecting public health and insuring food safety remain top priorities for HHS. FDA inspectors were not impacted [by job cuts] and this critical work will continue.”
Public health advocates warn companies and growers will face less regulatory oversight and fewer consequences for selling tainted food products as a result of recent FDA actions.
The administration is disbanding a Justice Department unit that pursues civil and criminal actions against companies that sell contaminated food and is reassigning its attorneys. Some work will be assumed by other divisions, according to a publicly posted memo from the head of the department’s criminal division and a white paper by the law firm Gibson Dunn.
The Justice Department did not respond to an email requesting comment.
“They need the DOJ to enforce the law,” said Sarah Sorscher, director of regulatory affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. “For an executive investing in food safety, the knowledge they could go to jail if they don’t is a really strong motivator.”
Federal regulators also want states to conduct more inspections, according to two former FDA officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. But some Democratic lawmakers say states lack the resources to take over most food safety inspections.
“Handing that duty to state and local agencies is really troubling,” said Rep. Shontel M. Brown (D-Ohio). “They don’t have the resources, and it creates a potentially unsafe situation that puts families in Ohio and America at risk.”
For 13 days, Colton stayed on dialysis at the hospital, initially unable to eat or drink. His mother wet a sponge to moisten his lips and tongue.
He turned 10 in the hospital. Chris George bought paint markers to make signs on the windows of his son’s room.
“I am not happy with the CDC and FDA,” Chris George said. “Victims have a right to know who made them sick. This is my kid. He’s my life.”
Colton was able to leave the hospital almost three weeks after first eating the contaminated lettuce but still has nightmares about the ordeal and is seeing a therapist.
“The whole ‘Make America Healthy Again,’ the focus on taking food color dyes out of cereal?” said Chris George, who objects to the Trump administration’s decision to redact information about the grower in the February report. “How about we take E. coli out of our lettuce, so it doesn’t kill our kids?”
TITLE: How safe is the food supply after federal cutbacks? Experts are worried
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/05/29/nx-s1-5413449/food-safety-inspection-fda-usda
EXCERPT: Paula Soldner inspected meat and poultry plants around southern Wisconsin for 38 years: "I'm talking brats, hot dogs, summer sausage, pizza."
Her Department of Agriculture job required daily check-ups on factories to ensure slicers were cleaned on schedule, for example. Her signoff allowed plants to put red-white-and-blue "USDA inspected" stickers on grocery-store packages.
Last month, Soldner took the Trump administration up on its offer of early retirement, joining an exodus from the Food Safety and Inspection Service that began under President Biden's reorganization of the agency last year. Soldner, who also chairs the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, says remaining inspectors must now visit eight facilities — double the usual number — each day.
That's not possible, she says, so it's unclear how much food is legitimately earning that stamp of approval.
"Did that plant receive that daily inspection from inspection personnel? In my mind, that's a huge question mark," Soldner says.
She says further staff retirements, hostility toward federal workers, and plummeting morale are creating conditions that make consumers more vulnerable to outbreaks of foodborne illness, like the deadly listeria contamination that hit Boar's Head deli meats last year, killing 10 people and hospitalizing dozens.
"Do I foresee another Boar's Head situation? Absolutely," she says. "I worry about the public."
Experts who study the nation's food supply say the safety of everything we eat — from milk and macaroni to meat and lettuce — is called into question because of massive cuts by the Trump administration to the three federal agencies charged with monitoring it: the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Our federal food safety system is teetering on the brink of a collapse," says Sarah Sorscher, a policy expert at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. She's most concerned about the loss of expertise from recent job cuts.
But she also worries about policy moves like the administration's rollback of new USDA food-safety rules set last August that would have limited the amount of salmonella in poultry in order for it to be sold. Instead, the agency said it is reevaluating the issue and whether salmonella regulations need updating at all.
In statements emailed to NPR, FDA and USDA said recent streamlining of their operations will not alter their commitment to food safety. USDA announced Tuesday that it boosted funds to reimburse states for food safety inspections by $14.5 million.
In a separate emailed statement, the USDA called its inspectors' work "critical," and said therefore inspectors were exempt from its hiring freeze, and its "front-line inspectors and veterinarians were not offered the opportunity to participate" in the agency's second early retirement offer in April "because of the essential nature of their work."
However, NPR reviewed emails sent from USDA officials urging inspectors to take the early retirement deal and confirming their eligibility for it, as well as a document listing eligible job categories, including consumer safety inspector and slaughterhouses inspectors.
Last month, the Trump administration also abruptly shuttered two of the FDA's seven food testing labs in San Francisco and Chicago, according to several FDA staffers who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
The ensuing chaos delayed seafood inspections and routine produce testing, the FDA staffers, including microbiologists working in different labs, told NPR. Samples of lettuce or fruit had to be shipped in ice-packed containers to redirect them to other labs, where a shortage of staff and basic lab supplies such as plastic pipettes and other testing supplies, makes it difficult to triage the workload.
This month, the administration reopened the two labs, but Sorscher, who leads regulatory affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, says damage has been done. "It's as if you took a chainsaw and started cutting holes out of the walls of a house," she says. "You can't really point to the fact that the doors or windows are still there and say, 'Don't worry, the house is secure.'"
TITLE: Trump’s climate denial may help a livestock-killing pest make a comeback
https://grist.org/food-and-agriculture/trump-climate-denial-screwworm-fly-make-comeback/
EXCERPTS: It was 1952, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture was conducting a series of field tests with male screwworm flies that had been sterilized with gamma radiation. The experiment’s aim was to get them to mate with their female counterparts, reduce the species’ ability to reproduce, and gradually shrink the population — and its screw-shaped larvae’s propensity to burrow into living mammals before swiftly killing their host — into oblivion.
It didn’t fully work, but the population did diminish. So the team of scientists tried again; this time in an even more remote location — Curaçao, an island in the Dutch Caribbean. That quickly proved to be successful, a welcome development after a decades-long battle by scientists, farmers, and government officials against the fly, which was costing the U.S. economy millions annually and endangering colossal numbers of livestock, wildlife, and even the occasional human. Within months, the screwworm population on Curaçao fell, and the tactic would be replicated at scale.
The USDA took its extermination campaign first throughout much of the south, and then all the way west to California. From then on, planes loaded with billions of sterilized insects were also routinely flown over Mexico and Central America. By the 1970s, most traces of the screwworm had vanished from the U.S., and by the early 1990s, it had all but disappeared from across the southern border and throughout the southernmost region of North America.
Since 1994, the USDA has partnered with the Panamanian government to control and wipe out established populations all the way down to the country’s southeastern Darién province, where the Comisión Panamá–Estados Unidos para la Erradicación y Prevención del Gusano Barrenador del Ganado, or COPEG, now maintains what’s colloquially called the “great American worm wall.” Each week, millions of sterilized screwworms bred in a nearby production facility are dropped by plane over the rainforest along the Panama-Colombia border — an invisible screwworm biological barrier zone, complete with round-the-clock human-operated checkpoints and inspections. But questions are now surfacing about its efficacy.
The pest is attracted to open wounds as small as tick bites and mucous membranes, such as nasal passages, where the female fly lays her eggs. A single female can lay up to 300 eggs at a time, and has the capacity to produce thousands during her short lifespan. Those eggs then hatch into larvae that burrow into the host animals with sharp mouth hooks and feed on living flesh.
To save the host, the larvae must be removed from the infested tissue. Otherwise the infestation can cause serious harm, and can even be fatal within a matter of days.
Female flies generally mate only once in their lifespan, but can continuously lay more than one batch of eggs every few days, which is why the sterile-insect technique has long been considered a fail-safe tactic for wiping out populations, when accompanied by surveillance and host treatment and quarantine. The best way to prevent infestation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is to avoid exposure.
About 20 years after the “worm wall” was created, the screwworm was spotted in the Florida Keys, the first sighting in the Sunshine State since the 1960s. An endangered deer population in Big Pine Key was discovered with the telltale symptoms of gaping wounds and erratic, pained behavior. The USDA responded rapidly, deploying hordes of sterilized flies, setting up fly traps in affected areas, and euthanizing deer with advanced infections. In totality, the parasite killed more than 130 Key deer, a population estimated at less than 1,000 before the outbreak. Though the threat was contained by the following year, the incident stoked concerns throughout the country.
No one really knows why the worm wall has started to fail. Some believe that human-related activities, such as increasing cattle movements and agricultural expansion, have allowed the flies to breach the barrier that, until recently, had been highly effective at curbing the insect’s range expansion. Max Scott, professor of entomology and genetics at North Carolina State University, researches strains of livestock pests for genetic control programs, with a focus on the screwworm.
“Why did it break down after being successful for so long? That’s the million-dollar question,” said Scott.
Bridget Baker, a veterinarian and research assistant professor at the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, thinks climate change may have had something to do with the screwworm’s sudden reappearance in the Florida Keys. “There was a major storm just prior to the outbreak. So the question is, were flies blown up from Cuba, for example, into the Florida Keys from that storm?” said Baker. Though invasive in the U.S., the screwworm is endemic in Cuba, South America, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.
“And if there’s more major storms, could that potentially lead to more of these upward trajectories of the fly?” she added. “With climate change, all sorts of species are expected to have range shifts, and so it would be reasonable to assume that the flies could also experience those range shifts. And those range shifts are expected to come higher in latitude.”
In the past few years, we may have seen just that happen. In 2023, an explosive screwworm outbreak occurred in Panama — the recorded cases in the country shot up from an average of 25 cases annually to more than 6,500. Later that year, an infected cow was found in southern Mexico not far from the border of Guatemala. In response, last November, the USDA halted Mexico’s livestock imports from entering Texas and increased deployments of sterile screwworm males south of the border. Early this year, the suspension was lifted, after both nations agreed to enhanced inspection protocols.
Then, on May 11, the USDA suspended live cattle, horse, and bison imports from Mexico yet again. The fly had been spotted in remote farms in the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Veracruz, only 700 miles from the southern U.S. border. Experts worry it may just be on the verge of resurging in the U.S.
Before it was widely eradicated, the screwworm had been considered somewhat of a seasonal problem in more northern climates where it wasn’t endemic, as it was routinely killed off by freezing temperatures. Though the metallic green-blue fly thrives in tropical temperatures, it doesn’t tend to survive in conditions lower than 45 degrees Fahrenheit, though the movement of livestock and wildlife has shown that colder spells aren’t a silver bullet. As the planet heats up, rising temperatures are creating more favorable conditions for a legion of agricultural pests, like the parasitic fly, to spread and thrive.
Thirty-year average coldest temperatures are rising almost everywhere in the U.S., a new Climate Central analysis found. Future climatic modeling predicts those average temperatures will only continue to climb — further influencing which plants and insects thrive and where across the country.
“With climate change … if it becomes warm enough, and you can get permanent establishment in those areas, then we got a problem,” said [Andrew Paul Gutierrez, professor emeritus at University of California, Berkeley, has been investigating the relationship between invasive pests and weather since the 1970s].
As the USDA attempts to skirt the role of climate change and weather dynamics in escalating the threat, Gutierrez questions whether the agency’s response and longer-term plan to combat the threat from screwworm flies is destined to fall short. The agency’s response is missing what Gutierrez designates “really critical” insight into how screwworms interact with temperature conditions, and what climate-induced shifts in those means for its survival and reproduction.
The USDA, said Gutierrez, “spends an awful lot of money” on dealing with the screwworm issue, but he argues that is being hindered by a lack of understanding of the weather-pest-biology relationship, or how weather drives the dynamics of such a species. “And if you don’t know that, then you can’t, say, model the interaction of the invasive species and its natural enemies, or the effects of weather on the invasive species itself,” he said.
“Without that kind of platform, you’re kind of flying blind.”