As the death toll from the H7N9 virus — the mysterious new Chinese bird flu strain that experts have labeled “one of the most lethal” of its kind — rises, a team of Chinese scientists is taking heat for creating 127 new hybrid influenza types in laboratories by combining “the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus with the highly infectious H1N1 human influenza virus.” Researchers from around the globe described the scientists’ actions as “appallingly irresponsible.”

The team of scientists, led by Professor Hualan Chen, published its results in the journal Science on Thursday. Chen argued that her team was simply trying to learn more about the complexities of mutating viral strains and how animal-only flu strains can spread among humans. In an email to the U.K. paper The Independent, Chen said, “The studies demonstrated that H5N1 viruses have the potential to acquire mammalian transmissibility by re-assortment with the human influenza viruses. This tells us that high attention should be paid to monitor the emergence of such mammalian-transmissible virus in nature to prevent a possible pandemic caused by H5N1 virus.”

Other scientists aren’t quite sold on that argument, citing concerns with laboratory safety in Chinese facilities and the limited knowledge gleaned from such experimentation. “The record of containment in labs like this is not reassuring. They are taking it upon themselves to create human-to-human transmission of very dangerous viruses. It’s appallingly irresponsible,” said Robert May of Oxford University. “The virological basis of this work is not strong. It is of no use for vaccine development and the benefit in terms of surveillance for new flu viruses is oversold,” added Pasteur Institute virologist Simon Wain-Hobson.

The construction of new pathogens has always been controversial within the scientific community. In highly-controlled environments, it may be used to outline a virus’ interactions with other agents and create effective vaccines. But many in the scientific community are concerned about the possibility of widespread death and destruction from the synthesized contaminants, either due to insufficient lab safety requirements — or something more sinister. Randall Larsen, former executive director of the Congressional Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, told The Scientist that many countries have biological weapons programs with the express purpose of creating dangerous new pathogens. In fact, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, a defecting scientist revealed that “the Soviet Union had active programs to weaponize Legionnaire’s disease, Ebola, smallpox, and HIV.”

China’s recent project obviously doesn’t have such a nefarious motivation driving it. But given the risks of creating new, possibly drug-resistant strains of viruses — and the difficulty of effectively containing them — the new study has given many in the scientific community pause.

Before sequestration’s automatic budget cuts kicked in, scientists warned that the proposed 8.2 across-the-board cut to the Nation Institute of Health could set back scientific innovation for a generation. Slashing those funds from NIH, one of the agency’s former directors pointed out, could prevent scientists from doing the critical research necessary to develop new treatments for chronic conditions and rare diseases.

And now that the sequester has taken effect, some of those scenarios are beginning to play out. As the Huffington Post reports, medical researchers are already scaling back their projects in areas that could have big implications for public health. At Temple University, one team of researchers hoped to develop a more effective method of repairing the heart to help Americans better recover from heart attacks — but now, thanks to the recent budget cuts, they may have to lay off staff or test a fewer number of potential therapies. Virginia Tech researchers who are studying depression, substance abuse, and post traumatic stress disorder have already been dealt a $640,000 blow to their grant funding, and are bracing for another $1 million in cuts. At the University of Kansas, the funds for behavioral research to help educators learn how to work with children with disabilities are in limbo.

And, since it seems clear that lawmakers aren’t going to take any action to reverse the cuts, scientists are being forced to move forward under this new reality:

Like other doctors and researchers interviewed, [Charles Greenwood, a researcher at the University of Kansas] said he would look to foundations and private philanthropy to help fill the void left by sequestration. But that isn’t a satisfactory replacement, he said, in part because the money tends to have specific strings attached.

“It is a hell of a way to run science,” he says. “We have had science since World War II. In the United States we were smart enough to develop a competitive process where the best ideas out there come up through the agencies responsible. And we get the best minds in the country to compete and the best ones win. Now, if it is up to philanthropy then you are just going to get someone’s theory.”

Mainly, however, Greenwood and others are worried that the budget cuts will cause irrevocable damage to science in America. Investment in research and development was already declining prior to sequestration. NIH reported that it had offered 400 fewer grants in 2012 than in 2010. And as Jonathan Links, the chief risk officer at Johns Hopkins University, told The Huffington Post, funders were cutting back even further in anticipation of sequestration taking place.

“It does seem clear that program officers are now being told moving forward to behave with sequestration. It is shifting from anticipation of to actual sequestration behavior,” said Links. “It is going to be cuts to grants and contracts and other sponsored activities. And our best guess is it is going to be some combination of cuts to future years of already funded grants, cuts to new awards, and cuts in the number of grants.”

Medical research isn’t the only area where Americans’ future health is being threatened threatened by sequestration. The budget cuts could also potentially result in fewer food inspections, fewer mental health resources, fewer people getting screened for HIV, fewer government resources to provide health insurance to low-income Americans, and fewer cancer patients receiving chemotherapy treatment.

Members of the medical community have blasted lawmakers for prioritizing their own convenience over the health sector. The cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which resulted in long delays at airports around the country for lawmakers during their frequent travel, is the one area of sequestration that Congress has rushed to undo — likely because it personally inconvenienced them. Cancer clinic employees have argued that there are more pressing concerns facing the nation, like the funding for their patient’s life-saving treatment, than long lines at the airport. The scientific researchers who are beginning to worry about a future “brain drain,” when the U.S. may not be able to attract and retain talented scientists without enough funding to go around, likely agree with that assessment.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), has been around in one form or another since the 1950s. It contains standardized definitions and a common language for the treatment of mental disorders, and it’s set to release its fifth edition — the first updated issue of the tome since 1994 — later this month. Count the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) as one group that’s canceling its subscription.

The DSM is sometimes described as the “bible” of the mental health field. It can take at least a decade to produce updates to the manual that incorporate shifts in medical research. But in a blog post on the NIMH website, the federal organization argues that, when it comes to the well-being of mental health patients, the DSM simply isn’t cutting it:

The goal of this new manual, as with all previous editions, is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology. While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity. Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. [...]

Patients with mental disorders deserve better. NIMH has launched the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project to transform diagnosis by incorporating genetics, imaging, cognitive science, and other levels of information to lay the foundation for a new classification system.

The case against using the DSM boils down to the APA’s lack of clinical and longitudinal studies in crafting it — a major shortcoming that mental health advocates argue relegates the DSM to a semantics-based publication, with little connection to the needs and realities of actual mental health patients. Consequently, many updates to the DSM are more reflective of changes in sociopolitical thinking, rather than underlying scientific realities. For instance, one of the “updates” included in the DSM-V strikes kinky sex habits and queer behaviors such as S&M, fetishism, and transvestism from being considered “mental disorders of abnormal or unusual attraction.”

NIMH instead calls for a holistic — and scientific — approach to constructing an alternate diagnostic “Bible” that is “based on the biology as well as the symptoms” and maps the “cognitive, circuit, and genetic aspects of mental disorders [to] yield new and better targets for treatment.”

Just two months after thousands of dead pigs floated down the Huangpu River, a new food safety scare has rocked China. Officials announced Thursday that police have taken down an extensive meat adulteration ring that has long been passing off un-inspected rat, fox, and mink carcasses as lamb.

While Europe’s horsemeat scandal earlier this year was physically harmless, China’s rat meat scam only hints at the dire public health threats posed by the nation’s underground meat market.

Chinese police arrested 63 people in the fake lamb scheme as part of a larger operation to combat an illegal industry of fake, diseased or adulterated meat. Since late January, police have seized 20,000 tons of unsafe meat and broken up 1,721 factories and shops manufacturing and trading in un-inspected meat usually pumped full of illegal preservatives and toxins. One person even died recently after eating illegally-produced lamb riddled with pesticides. Mass illnesses caused by contaminated meat in 2011 is also still fresh in Chinese memory.

Despite recent efforts to crack down on counterfeit meat, the black market has flourished in the absence of effective regulation:

China’s prime minister since March, Li Keqiang, has said that improving food safety was a priority — one of the main grievances of ordinary citizens that he has said his government would tackle. But similar vows by his predecessor, Wen Jiabao, ran up against inadequate resources, buck-passing and muddle among rival agencies, and protectionism by local officials, said Mao Shoulong, a professor of public policy at Renmin University in Beijing, in an interview.

“Chinese food production has become larger scale and more technological, but the problems emerging also involve using more sophisticated technology to beat regulators and cheat consumers,” he said. “The government’s efforts need to catch up with the scale and complexity of the problems.”

China’s court also issued new guidelines Friday advising tough sentencing and harsh punishment for anyone caught making or selling unsafe food. However, some critics have decried the government’s focus on punitive measures after contamination has already occurred, instead calling for greater inspection and enforcement of food safety standards.

Though the American food safety framework is currently much stronger than China’s, some lawmakers here are actually pushing to weaken food inspection and regulatory oversight over meat production. Unlike China, foodborne illness in the U.S. does not come from nameless criminals, but rather from powerful companies with huge shares of the market. These companies have actively pushed for weaker regulation even as outbreaks of foodborne illnesses are becoming more common. Republican legislators have complied, gutting food safety programs and the Food and Drug Administration.

Through a new state-sponsored initiative called the Condom Access Project, California children living in areas with high STI and teen birth rates will soon be able to get condoms — and instructions on how to use them — delivered for free to their doorsteps after ordering them online. The project is intended to stem the rising tide of teen births and sexually transmitted infections such as gonorrhea, chlamydia, and syphilis in the Golden State.

The website for the service — TeenSource.org — includes information on teen mental and physical health support services, resources for family planning, and maps of facilities that conduct STI testing. Teens between the ages of 12 and 19 will be able to receive as many as ten free condoms per month through the site, which also points users to additional free condom resources and clinics. Once an order is placed, “a package of condoms, lubricant and an educational pamphlet arrives at teenagers’ homes in a nondescript yellow envelope” within several days.

Critics and abstinence-education advocates have lashed out at the effort, asserting that “the overwhelming majority of parents” would be opposed to such a service — but given the failure of abstinence-only sex education, the difficulty of accessing contraception, and California’s recent health trends, it may be necessary one. According to comprehensive data on the California Department of Public Health’s website, California teenage girls between the ages of 10 and 19 make up about 30 percent of all chlamydia and gonorrhea cases, and the teen live birth rate is about 3.5 percent. Those numbers represent rises over previous years, and are comprised of a disproportionate number of poor and minority populations.

Campaigns to prevent the transmission of sexually transmitted infections are also important considering the rise of antibiotic resistant pathogens. Researchers recently identified the first cases of gonorrhea — the second-most common STI — that are immune to antibiotics.

According to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), young girls may get the same benefits from less doses of the HPV vaccine compared to older women. Study authors hope that the findings will result in higher rates of girls’ HPV immunization in the U.S., which the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have deemed “unacceptably low.”

The study finds that giving girls aged nine to 13 two doses of the HPV vaccine — commonly called Gardasil — is enough to immunize them. “Nine to 13-year-old girls make a much better anti-body, a better protective response to the vaccine than 16 to 26 year olds,” said Dr. Simon Dobson, lead study author and University of British Columbia pediatrician. That could potentially convince more American parents to get their children vaccinated by making the process less cumbersome, since the HPV vaccine is usually administered over the course of three doses to older girls and women.

This latest study gives credence to federal officials’ recommendations that girls — and boys — receive the vaccination beginning at age 11 as a preventative measure. Many American parents have ignored those suggestions, pointing to the statistic that most people who are infected with HPV do not develop cancer. However, that’s a risky bet given that there is no way to know who is at risk of contracting cervical cancer from an HPV infection, and who isn’t.

A mere 30 percent of U.S. women between the ages of 19 and 26 have received one or more doses of the HPV vaccine — a percentage that some surveys indicate may fall even further. That may partly be because many parents are swayed by conspiracy theories endorsed by fear-mongering politicians that Gardasil is unsafe — a claim that has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked by the scientific community.

Pro-anorexia (pro-ANA) and -bulimia (pro-MIA) communities tend to promote thinspiration, or “thinspo,” material, which encompasses images and messages that encourage thinness often to the point of self-harm. Thinspo images have been chased from social network to social network — but despite the fact that many platforms have policies discouraging their promotion, the material frequently ends up making its way back, even on sites with outright bans. Two recent petitions urging other major tech sites to take action against thinspo highlight the delicate balance that tech companies walk between protecting users from harmful content and censoring free speech, as well as the larger question of the effectiveness of censorship in helping those struggling with body image issues help themselves.

What is and is not acceptable on private social media sites is governed by content policies — meaning that platforms like Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter all have control over the type of content they allow on their networks to a certain extent. In fact, tech companies and their content policies have arguably have the most influence over the development of online freedom of expression on an international scale. While most tech companies oppose censoring political or religious content, many — including Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest — have moved to ban content promoting self harm, such as pro-ANA and pro-MIA images or pages, to various degrees of success.

A recent Change.org petition calls on Twitter to join their ranks, urging signers to “[h]elp make Twitter accountable for managing the users of its service to stop this harmful trend by banning thinspiration hashtags and monitoring dangerous user activity.” However, banning hashtags like “#proANA” or “#thinspo” may just lead to the development of new hashtags, or push users onto yet another community. And historically, Twitter has taken a hands-off approach to monitoring or punishing user speech, giving a free range to porn users and controversial content — they’re even being sued in France for refusing to reveal the identities of anti-Semitic users who used (and later deleted) a hashtag that translates to “a good jew.”

The second petition is addressed to search giant Google, in response to the fact that the search giant indexes millions of results for pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia sites. Instead of asking for those sites to be banned or de-listed, however, activists are asking for a banner to be displayed with information for a helpline and recovery support at the top of results to eating disorder queries. This move is not unprecedented — results for Google queries related to suicide currently display the number for the National Suicide Hotline at the top, and Pinterest displays the number for the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) hotline on searches for thinspo related terms.

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The people who are born and raised in the United States are more likely to have asthma and allergies than the children who were born elsewhere and later immigrated to this country, according to the results from a new study. Researchers surveyed the parents of 80,000 children and found that the pattern held even across different regions, income levels, and races.

Researchers found that just over 20 percent of children born outside the U.S. had any type of allergic disease — a group including asthma, eczema, hay fever, and food allergies — compared to about 35 percent of the kids born within the country. Why is the U.S. making kids develop allergies? It’s not obvious exactly what’s going on, researchers say. But they suspect it’s a mix of several environmental factors, including an over-emphasis on hygiene that isn’t exposing kids to allergens and the poor quality of American diets.

“This is definitely something we see clinically and we’re trying to better understand, what is it in our environment that’s increasing the risk of allergic disease?” Dr. Ruchi Gupta, who studies allergies at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, told Reuters. Gupta was not involved in the new study.

Allergies aren’t the only potential health risk tied to the environment around us. Previous research has linked heavy traffic to breathing disorders, and found that kids who grow up living near busy roads are more likely to end up struggling with asthma. Air pollution has also been linked to host of other health risks in children, like lower birth weights and infant mortality. And, of course, Americans’ unhealthy diets — which the new study suggests may somehow be linked to allergy rates — has contributed to staggering rates of childhood obesity and put 80 percent of U.S. teens on the track to developing heart disease.

Vaccines are safe and effective. Yet an “unacceptably low” number of Americans receive their vaccinations, forgoing one of the most efficient forms of preventative care in the world. Part of that is due to false notions about vaccines’ efficacy and safety that stem from political fear-mongering and conspiracy theories. But another barrier to better vaccination rates is lack of access — and on World Immunization Week (April 24-30), some public health advocates are urging lawmakers to break it down.

Pharmacy Choice and Action Now (PCAN) is launching a national campaign to convince state lawmakers to loosen regulations on pharmacists providing vaccinations. Currently, appropriately-trained pharmacists can administer shots — but only a select few of them. In a press release, PCAN explained that “all 50 states allow trained pharmacists to administer vaccinations — all qualified state pharmacists can administer the influenza vaccine and 44 states allow qualified pharmacists to administer the shingles vaccine — but pharmacists are ready and willing to do more.”

In fact, pharmacists may actually have to do more in order to facilitate the influx of newly-insured patients who will gain coverage as Obamacare is fully implemented. The success of health care reform will largely depend on increased coordination between various medical workers, as well as more responsibilities for primary care doctors, technicians, nurses, and pharmacists. Pharmacies such as Walgreens have already announced plans to get ahead of the curve and start directly providing primary and chronic care services to their customers.

Other than assisting with health care reform, opening up pharmacists’ ability to administer vaccinations would also prove a crucial preventative health resource for low-income, rural, and other secluded populations that don’t have easy access to hospitals. In turn, that could help stem the tide of preventable deaths due to non-vaccination. “More than 50,000 adults and 300 children die from vaccine-preventable diseases or from their complications each year in the U.S. alone — I think we can do better than that,” said PCAN Chair Bill Mincy in the press release. “Expanding immunization authority for pharmacists is a sure way to increase access to vaccines and keep our communities healthy. I encourage state legislators to take a look at current laws and consider ways to achieve this.”

Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp. isn’t having the greatest year — and things just got much worse for the drug giant. In a civil suit that builds on a separate, sealed whistleblower case, federal prosecutors charged Novartis on Wednesday morning with paying out kickbacks in an effort to get pharmacies to switch kidney transplant patients’ anti-transplant rejection generic drugs with the brand-name Novartis product Myfortic.

The scope of Novartis’ alleged fraud is staggering. In the civil complaint, prosecutors charge that the company’s U.S.-based wing “used a program of rebates and discounts to boost sales of its anti-rejection drug.” Since Myfortic is far more expensive than its generic counterparts, this market share-gouging cost government health entitlements such as Medicare and Medicaid “tens of millions of dollars in reimbursements to pharmacies for which they were never entitled,” with Myfortic sales at companies that received the bribes totaling over $100 million. Some of those pharmacies allegedly received kickbacks making up a full 20 percent of their total Myfortic sales, while the U.S. government drove an outsized 47 percent of the drug’s total sales by specialty pharmacies.

If the allegations are true, then not only did Novartis brazenly defraud the United States government — the corporation and its co-conspirators also compromised public safety and patient health. As the civil complaint states, “Hundreds, possibly thousands, of transplant patients have undergone switches in their medication as a result of the recommendations from pharmacies that were based on undisclosed financial, rather than independent critical, considerations.”

Medicare and Medicaid fraud by pharmaceutical companies is the main driver of Justice Department settlements under the False Claims Act — the same statute that Novartis is being sued under. In 2012 alone, the Justice Department nabbed $3 billion from doctors and pharmaceutical companies that swindled the public entitlement programs by charging the government more than their services were actually worth. In fact, in 2010, Novartis had to settle a separate case involving kickbacks and misuse of drugs, paying out $420 million in criminal and civil damages. The newest slate of charges against the drug giant prompted Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara to call Novartis “a repeat offender.”

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