Health

Washington Post - A Washington Post analysis found that through March 31, halfway through this fiscal year, the number of competitive grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health is down by more than half compared with the same period last year. Biomedical funding has also undergone a shift, the analysis found, cutting the U.S. research footprint across nearly every major disease area — including fewer grants focused on women’s health, cancer and mental health.

Overall, the NIH supported over 2,700 fewer scientific projects in fiscal 2025, about a 15 percent cut in the number of competitive grants compared with the previous fiscal year. In Burns’s field, women’s health, there was a 31 percent drop in the number of projects funded in 2025 that included the word “women,” after years of steady growth in competitive awards.

Jacobin -   Mexico’s new national health system aims to provide universal care. At a moment when US taxpayer dollars are being harnessed to destroy health care infrastructure abroad, Mexico is attempting to make a constitutional right to care into a reality

Congressional Insider - A major European study tracking over 10,000 aging adults has upended the mainstream narrative about loneliness and cognitive decline, revealing that while isolation hurts memory now, it doesn’t actually speed up the brain’s aging process—challenging decades of assumptions and raising questions about how public health officials have been framing this growing crisis.

Health - To examine the link between home cooking and dementia, researchers turned to the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study, an ongoing program that has tracked Japanese adults ages 65 and older since 1999. The team analyzed data from nearly 11,000 participants over six years, looking at how many people developed dementia, how often they cooked at home, and how they rated their cooking skills.

A clear pattern emerged: Participants who cooked at home at least once a week experienced significantly less cognitive decline than those who cooked less often. 

Men who cooked regularly had a 23% lower risk of dementia, while women saw an even larger reduction, at 27%. People who started out with minimal cooking skills seemed to benefit the most, with a 67% lower incidence of dementia. The link held even when researchers accounted for lifestyle and socioeconomic factors.