How Trump is reshaping American health

Medicine researchers have left to compile national data by hand, contraceptive guidelines deemed essential by erased doctors, and the largest tuberculosis epidemic in the country is not reported: the administration of President Donald Trump launched The American health system in an unexplored territory.

Here is an overview of some of the biggest impacts.

The key medical newspaper becomes silent

A few days following the fact that Trump took office last month, the Department of Health and Social Services imposed an indefinite “break” on communications.

One of his first victims was The weekly ratio of morbidity and mortality (Mmwr), a venerable epidémiological digest published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

For the first time in 60 years, the journal – which once published the first case studies of what was going to become the AIDS crisis – missed two editions, without any words when it comes back.

“MMWR is the voice of science. The delay in the publishing is dangerous,” wrote the former CDC director Tom Frieden, on Bluesky.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Faust, doctor and instructor of Harvard who directs interior medicine, reported that CDC scientists have been invited to withdraw or suspend all the articles subject to external journals to remove the language deemed offensive – including The word “genre”.

Critical resources for doctors have been rubbed

Doctors at the national level are in shock after the sudden elimination of a CDC application which helped determine the adequacy of contraceptives according to the medical history and patient medicines.

Also removed: clinical advice for PREP (a critical HIV prevention tool), resources on Intimate partner violenceand LGBTQ +behavioral health guidelines.

Some pages have been restored but now wear a disturbing banner: “The CDC website is changed to comply with President Trump’s decrees”. Others remain missing, causing generalized confusion.

Jessica Valenti, a feminist author and founder of abortion every day, archived the materials deleted on cdcguidelines.com to preserve the original and inclusive versions.

“Hope is that it is a resource for people who need it,” she told AFP, adding that even if the documents are restored, words like “trans” can be collapsed them.

Infectious epidemics not reported

While medical associations ring the alarm on the lack of federal health communication, epidemics slide under the radar.

In Kansas City, Kansas, the largest tuberculosis epidemic In the United States, history takes place with 67 active cases since 2024 – but no national authority has reported it.

“The National Medical Association (NMA) calls for a rapid resolution to the federal freezing of health communications, which has the potential to exacerbate this epidemic and other threats of public health,” wrote the group, which represents doctors African-Americans.

Likewise, an epidemic of measles among schoolchildren not vaccinated in Texas was not reported at the national level.

Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist who studies influenza trends, wrote on her blog that she had used accounting cases manually from the 50 state health services because the CDC central data repository has been deleted.

© 2025 AFP