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  • A government-commissioned study found drinking risks. U.S. guidelines didn’t feature its findings

    A study commissioned by President Joe Biden’s administration to investigate alcohol-related health harms was released independently on Tuesday, after President Donald Trump’s administration decided not to feature the researchers’ findings in new dietary guidelines as it faced pushback from the alcohol industry and a congressional committee.

    The findings of the study, in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, were in line with years of research, saying that health risks go up with just one drink a day and no level of alcohol has a protective effect on mortality. Even levels considered “moderate” raise the risk of premature death and more than 200 diseases, including heart disease and cancer, researchers found.

    The new study was one of two government reviews meant to help inform the new dietary guidelines. Released earlier this year, the guidelines advised consuming “less alcohol for better overall health.” The authors of the independently released study say that didn’t provide detailed practical advice about the risks of drinking.

    One of the officials involved in the study commissioned by Biden’s Democratic administration accused Trump’s Republican administration of “sidelining” the research — an allegation the Trump administration denies.

    Robert Vincent, a former Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration alcohol policy official who led the yearslong effort, made the accusations in an editorial published alongside the study. Vincent was laid off last year as part of a government reduction in force.

    “The challenges confronting alcohol policy today are not rooted in scientific uncertainty,” Vincent wrote. “What remains contested is whether evidence will meaningfully inform policy when it conflicts with commercial interests.”

    The dispute over the study underscored the increasingly tense relations between the medical and scientific community and the Trump administration, which has questioned or ignored longstanding science in its policymaking, fired a slew of veteran scientists from the federal workforce, and cut scientific grants that proponents say help keep the U.S. at the forefront of medical innovation.

    Industry and congressional Republicans pushed back

    After the study’s researchers released a draft report last year, the alcohol industry mobilized against it, launching campaigns to discredit its work. The House oversight committee also criticized the study, releasing a report earlier this year that called it “fraught with bias” and accused the study authors of having predetermined conclusions based on their past research and affiliations.

    Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, denied any notion that the study wasn’t considered.

    HHS and the U.S. Department of Agriculture “reviewed the study alongside the broader body of available scientific evidence and followed the established process for developing the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans,” she said. “The Guidelines are informed by the totality of the scientific record, not any single report or analysis.”

    Vincent told the Associated Press in an interview that the researchers were thoroughly vetted for conflicts and the findings were scientifically sound. He said that while he was in the Trump administration, he was “asked to kill the study” but did not. HHS didn’t immediately respond to that claim. The department said the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration wasn’t involved in the review or the clearance of the study for publication.

    Amanda Berger, senior vice president of science and research for the alcohol trade association the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, said in an email to the AP that the congressional committee’s findings showed the study was “irretrievably flawed.”

    Findings support more forceful alcohol intake recommendation

    The Trump administration earlier this year released new dietary guidelines that advised consuming “less alcohol for better overall health.” The researchers said that they don’t dispute that advice but that their findings support a more detailed and forceful recommendation that current adult drinkers consume one drink or fewer a day.

    “I’m glad that they had a message that corresponds with our science, and that is that less is best,” said Timothy Naimi, director of the University of Victoria’s Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research and one of the study’s authors. “But giving people quantity information is necessary to make a truly informative guideline.”

    The study differed from the other research commissioned by the government to help inform the dietary guidelines on the issue, which said moderate alcohol use was associated with a decreased risk of mortality from all causes but also an increased risk of some diseases.

    Priscilla Martinez-Matyszczyk, one of the authors of the new study and a deputy scientific director at the Public Health Institute’s Alcohol Research Group, said their study didn’t look at mortality from all causes but instead examined mortality specifically attributed to alcohol to avoid confounding factors.

    Martinez-Matyszczyk also addressed an issue raised by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz in his explanations of the new guidelines: that drinking is “a social lubricant that brings people together” and that even though not drinking is preferred, being social has health benefits.

    “I don’t know of any studies that have teased out the social effect from the health effect,” she said.

    Research aligns with other recent findings

    The new findings are “in line with the latest science that basically shows less is better when it comes to health,” Naimi said.

    For example, a 2019 study in Lancet found that moderate drinking slightly raised the risk of stroke and high blood pressure and offered no protective effects on health.

    Moderate drinking was once thought to have benefits for the heart, but better research methods have thrown cold water on that idea. Older studies compared groups of people by how much they drink instead of randomly assigning people to drink or not, so they couldn’t prove cause and effect. When researchers adjusted for things like education levels, income, and healthcare access, the benefits tended to disappear.

    About half of Americans age 12 or older had a drink in the past month, researchers said, making it the most commonly used addictive substance in the U.S. One drink is the equivalent of about one 12-ounce can of beer, a 5-ounce glass of wine or a shot of liquor.

  • A flesh-eating cattle parasite spreads beyond Texas as new screwworm cases are found

    Two more cases of the New World screwworm have been confirmed, including one outside the main cluster in Texas, demonstrating the difficulty of stopping a pest that could potentially devastate the nation’s cattle industry, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Monday.

    The screwworm is actually a fly larva that eats living flesh instead of dead material. Females lay their eggs in open wounds of warm-blooded animals like cattle, but wildlife, pets, and occasionally even humans can be infested. A government program to breed sterile male flies and drop swarms of them from planes to mate with wild females had kept screwworm contained at the southern end of Panama for decades.

    So far, there are four confirmed cases: three calves in Texas and a dog from neighboring Lea County, New Mexico. The dog, which the USDA initially reported as a Texas case, lives in New Mexico and was reclassified as the first in that state. The animal’s travel history is being investigated.

    The first two screwworm cases were discovered last week in calves a few miles apart in south Texas. The third was announced Monday in La Salle County, southwest of San Antonio.

    Scientists expect a handful of new cases could pop up in the coming days and weeks, but it doesn’t mean screwworm is spreading rapidly, said Edward Burgess, a University of Florida entomologist who studies the fly.

    “When that first case is seen, everyone is being vigilant and their eyes are on it more intensely,” Burgess said. “And when you are looking for something, you are more likely to see it.”

    The USDA and the U.S. cattle industry have been racing to prevent an infestation since screwworm was detected in Mexico late in 2024. The annual warm-weather scourge of cattle ranchers had been eliminated in the U.S. in the 1960s.

    So far, its reappearance hasn’t greatly affected beef prices, which are already near record levels because there are fewer cows in the U.S. Although the parasite attacks live cattle, it does not infest meat or fruit. There are also a dozen government-approved medications to treat livestock.

    Canada temporarily stopped importing cattle, horses, or other livestock from Texas on Friday. The parasites prefer humid areas where temperatures are at least 77 F, making them more of a summer problem up north.

    USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins was scheduled tol hold a news conference about the infestation Monday afternoon following a briefing at the U.S. Livestock Insects Research Laboratory in Kerrville, Texas.

    Burgess said the long-term solution — breeding sterile male flies — is months away. Since wild female flies mate just once, if that encounter is with a sterile male, outbreaks can eventually be halted as the flies die out.

    The USDA is working to both increase sterile fly production in plants outside the U.S. and build a massive fly factory in Texas.

    However, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said the federal response will take too long and risks crippling the cattle industry. Instead, he says, a poison bait could eliminate the screwworm problem in a few months, even if USDA and other experts say the bait hasn’t been proven to work and could poison other flies, animals, and even humans.

    “What the hell is a good fly?” Miller said in an interview Monday.