His aunt sat at the dining table, sobbing. His father, who’d walked him to the bus stop that morning and promised to take him to dinner when he got back, wasn’t there.

Saúl Zermeño, a 45-year-old single dad, had gone to a routine check-in appointment at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office that morning, a requirement he’d complied with for years. The father had deferred action that allowed him to stay and work in the U.S., according to his attorney. But that day, Oct. 3, officers deported him to Mexico, where he hadn’t lived since he was 9 years old. Zermeño had been Damian’s sole caregiver since he was a baby because his mother chose not to be involved in the boy’s life, the family said.

Suddenly, Damian, who was born in the U.S., found himself separated from his father by thousands of miles and a heavily guarded border. The previously cheerful 10th grader, who doesn’t have a driver’s license and can make a few basic dishes but isn’t used to cooking for himself, faced navigating his teenage years alone, his dad’s presence reduced to a two-dimensional image on his phone.

“I thought it wasn’t true,” Damian said. “I just went to my room. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t even want to eat.”

Damian is among an estimated , most of them U.S. citizens, separated from a parent by the Trump administration’s deportation policies. Their mothers and fathers have been deported or locked for months inside detention centers, often from where their families live. These children are separated, , from the adults they depend on. Parents have been arrested while , , and at immigration check-ins with their children present. Most people detained have . (Being in the U.S. without authorization is typically a civil offense). With their parents gone, kids’ lives are plunged into fear and uncertainty.

As a result, a generation of children from immigrant families are exhibiting mental health problems that could .

Parents, therapists, and others who work with immigrant families said they’ve already encountered preschoolers with speech delays, elementary school children who talk of suicide, and teenagers too anxious to leave the house. Research has shown repeatedly that separating children from their parents . The stress of losing a primary caregiver creates havoc in a child’s brain and body, increasing their risk for mental and physical health problems, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, a weakened immune system, and developmental delays.

“You can just see it in their faces; it’s almost like the light has been dimmed in their eyes,” said the Rev. Tanya Lopez, a pastor at Downey Memorial Christian Church who regularly visits immigrant families as part of a made up of Los Angeles-area religious leaders.

The health risks from this stress response are long-term. People who experience parental separation and other traumatic events as children are heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other chronic conditions as adults.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said ICE does not separate families, and that parents are asked if they want to be removed from the country with their children or to designate a safe person for them to stay with in the U.S.

However, by the Women’s Refugee Commission and Physicians for Human Rights found that many parents aren’t given that choice, and that ICE often doesn’t ask detainees if they have children or take steps to ensure that children left behind are safe. Saúl Zermeño said ICE officers didn’t ask about his son or check on Damian’s well-being when he was deported.

For days after his father’s deportation, Damian didn’t want to leave his room, eat, or go to school. He stopped talking to his friends. He stopped playing his favorite video game, Fears To Fathom. When he returned to school a week later, the teenager would cry in class or walk out overwhelmed with sadness. Even his favorite subject — English — lost its appeal.

Damian and his father were inseparable; family members joked that they never saw one without the other. Zermeño took Damian, who has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism, and other health conditions, to his medical appointments. He cooked for him and combed his hair. He loved to take Damian to his favorite Thai restaurant or to get boba drinks after school. As much as they joked around and played pranks on each other, Zermeño also taught Damian the importance of work by bringing him along to construction jobs and to find supplies at Home Depot.

Damian used to get annoyed with his father’s motivational chats about responsibility. Now they’re one of the things he misses most.

“I thank my dad every day for teaching me to be strong before he left,” Damian said.

Elsewhere in Los Angeles, Jacob, a shy 9-year-old with cropped, curly hair, skinny limbs, and a serious expression, was missing his mom. On a Saturday in May, he clung tightly to his father’s hand as they walked among homeless people, street peddlers, and the stench of urine that hangs in the air outside the building where they live in a cramped apartment. He hoped his mom would soon be released from immigration detention so that he could hug her again.

“If my mom was here, I’d be happy,” he said. “Right now, I’m not.”

Jacob is in some ways a typical 9-year-old. He likes playing Roblox and Street Fighter. He dreams of becoming a police officer and of owning a guard dog, “because you can train them and they defend you.”

But he also endured a harrowing journey, even before being separated from his mom in January. Jacob’s family fled their home country of Colombia in 2024 because members of a paramilitary group threatened to kill them, his father, Andreis, said. During their journey to the United States, Jacob saw dead bodies while trekking through the jungle, was kidnapped and robbed at gunpoint with his parents, witnessed a rape, and had to sell candy and beg for money, his dad said. ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News is not using the father’s or son’s real name because the family fears it would jeopardize their asylum cases.

After the family arrived in Los Angeles, Jacob suffered from nightmares and an intense fear of being alone. He started to recover once he began attending school and got connected to therapy through the school district, his dad said. For a short while, the family felt they had found peace.

Then, immigration officers detained Jacob’s mother at a check-in appointment while he and Andreis sat in the waiting room. The mother has a pending asylum application and no criminal record, Andreis said. The father said he and his son broke down when officers informed them of his wife’s detention, handing them a bag with her wallet and cellphone. They returned home without her, leaving Jacob inconsolable.

“He was terrified,” the father said, fighting back tears, his voice growing quiet as he recounted that moment. “He was crying with rage.”

After that, Jacob didn’t want to eat or go to school. When he went to school at his dad’s insistence, his teacher called home to ask why he was crying in class. Jacob couldn’t sleep. He acted out. He blamed his dad.

“When will my mom come back?” he asked his dad. “Why do they have my mom? I miss my mom.”

At the same time, Andreis said, he was going through his own crisis, trying in vain to console his son while wrestling with grief, worry, and desperation over what happened to his wife. He stopped his work as a laborer for two weeks to take care of Jacob, but that created financial stress and meant he sometimes couldn’t afford to fund his wife’s commissary account so she could buy better food and make phone calls. Jacob lived for those phone calls.

Jacob listed all the things he missed about his mom, including her cooking (rice with meat, corn cakes with egg), visiting the park together, and her taking him to get his hair cut, treating him to McDonald’s on the weekend, and bringing him to church. Most of all, he missed being close to her.

“I would lie down with her, and I’d watch videos with her,” he said. “My mom would hug me and I’d hug her.”

Sometimes he sprayed her perfume on himself so he could smell her.

After almost five months at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, Jacob’s mother was released based on a habeas corpus petition in May. The family is still living in fear of detention or deportation. The father worries he too could be detained, and what that would mean for Jacob. Andreis is currently appealing a removal order for the two of them.

A published by the Brookings Institution estimates that over 200,000 children — including 145,000 U.S. citizen children — have likely had at least one parent detained since President Donald Trump returned to office. About a third of those children are under age 6. The number of children with detained parents is expected to grow as the federal government pours over $200 billion into immigration enforcement, including funding from the GOP’s and a appropriation Trump signed this month.

More than 4.6 million U.S. citizen children live with a parent at risk of deportation, according to the report.

Families Broken

Noemi, a Guatemalan mother and asylum seeker, stood in the parking lot at an ICE office north of Los Angeles, her three children wailing and clinging to her, glass from the family’s car scattered at their feet.

Moments earlier, immigration agents had smashed a window and forced her partner out of the car while he waited for Noemi and the kids to finish a check-in appointment. While they were inside, officers tried to separate Noemi from the couple’s children, ages 9, 7, and 1, but gave up after the kids started screaming, Noemi said. Meanwhile, her partner, a Mexican national who’s lived in the U.S. for almost 20 years, was sent to the ICE detention center in Adelanto.

“It was something tragic, something inexplicable that happened that day,” said Noemi, who asked to withhold her full name because she fears government retaliation for sharing her story. “It’s something that marks you for your whole life. My family was broken.”

Located in the Mojave Desert, the privately run Adelanto ICE Processing Center is the immigration detention center closest to Los Angeles and in the U.S. It held a daily average of as of April, and a facility next door called the Desert View Annex held an additional 426.

Since her partner’s detention in December, Noemi said, their children haven’t been the same.

Her 7-year-old daughter, till then usually happy and smiling, became depressed and refused to eat. Her once-high grades plummeted, and she forgot the names of letters and numbers in both English and Spanish. She and her 9-year-old brother struggled to sleep and asked constantly about their dad, wondering if he was taken because they’d done something wrong.

“Why is this happening to us?” they asked her. “We’re good. We’re studying.”

Noemi’s youngest daughter went back to crawling for three months, even though she’d already learned to walk before her father was taken. The little girl would cry out in her sleep, “Pa! Pa!”

Sofia Mendoza, a therapist who works with immigrant families at a community clinic in Los Angeles County, said separated children can experience a form of grief. It’s hard for them to come to terms with their parent’s absence because the parent is still alive, but not with them. This can disrupt the child’s bond with that parent and their ability to form trusting relationships in the future, she said.

Many children also become extremely anxious, angry, and fearful, Mendoza said. Young children often complain of physical symptoms such as stomachaches, develop separation anxiety, and regress to earlier behaviors like bed-wetting. Older children may have panic attacks, nightmares, and difficulty focusing, Mendoza said. Caregiver loss is also associated with and substance use in children.

Norma Gómez, a project manager for the Mixteco Indigena Community Organizing Project in Oxnard, said after immigration raids shook the community last summer, her 9-year-old daughter refused to go to school for a week and was afraid to leave her mom and dad, even though they’re legal U.S. residents. She’d seen other kids at school crying because family members had been detained. Gómez showed her daughter their U.S. residency documents to reassure her. The child asked to make copies for her classmates, hoping they would protect them too.

‘Time To Be an Adult’

Back in East Los Angeles, Damian is living with one of his aunts and struggling to adapt to not having his father around. He said his grades have dropped because he can’t focus in school. He no longer wants to do things he used to enjoy with his dad, such as going out to eat.

“Fun is over,” he said. “It’s time to be an adult right now.”

Being without his father has forced Damian to become more independent, he and his aunt Claudia Zermeño said. Before, his dad did almost everything for him. Now, Damian does his own laundry, helps with housework, and styles his own hair. He’s protective of his aunts, who are both devastated by their brother’s absence; he hugs them frequently and tells jokes to try to cheer them up. He doesn’t want to upset them more by showing his own sadness.

Damian receives therapy both in and outside of school. He said he’s learned breathing exercises that have helped, but he still feels sad and worried a lot of the time. Sometimes he feels angry.

“I try my hardest to think, to stay focused,” he said. “But with everything that’s going on, I can’t keep the facade of ‘everything’s normal’ when I feel heartbroken.”

Saúl Zermeño, now living in Guadalajara, said he’s worried about his son’s health. Damian has a genetic condition called , which causes tumors to grow on nerve tissue in his body, including one in his head that, if not checked regularly by a doctor and monitored by his family, could interfere with his brain. He also suffers from epilepsy and was born with only one kidney, which means he tires easily and doesn’t play sports. Saúl is afraid his son won’t get the care he needs without him there. As Damian’s legal guardian, Claudia Zermeño is doing everything she can for him, but she has two children of her own and is also caring for her mother, who has neurological problems from a stroke.

Damian talks with his dad as often as he can. He hopes to visit his father in Mexico, but he doesn’t have a passport and, as a minor under 16, there are more requirements to get one without his dad present. Saúl is working with an attorney to get permission to legally return to the U.S., but the process is complicated and uncertain.

So, for now, Damian’s hanging on to hope that his dad will be allowed to return and is trying to become the man he believes he should be. He’s making plans to get his driver’s license when he turns 16 this month. He’s given up his goal of going to college and instead wants to get a job right after high school to help his aunts and send money to his dad.

He still cries, but only when he’s alone in his room.

This <a target="_blank" href="/mental-health/immigrant-parents-ice-detention-deportation-children-mental-health-california/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

The drug is now marketed and sold across the state in roadside shops and small-town strip malls with little oversight from health authorities. Highway billboards advertise ivermectin as “Available Without a Prescription in Tennessee!” while dozens of pharmacies offer highly concentrated pills, sometimes at 10 or 20 times the potency of a standard tablet.

Ivermectin is a approved by the FDA for treating , which can generally be done with a single dose of three or four prescription-strength tablets. It is also used as a dewormer for horses and other livestock.

Its popularity surged during the pandemic as fringe doctors and anti-vaccine activists promoted it as a treatment for covid. have shown that ivermectin is against covid.

Nonetheless, it has since become a symbol of resistance against the medical establishment among conservatives and followers of the Make America Healthy Again movement, championed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Timothy Caulfield, a professor at the University of Alberta who studies health misinformation, said ivermectin became an “ideological flag” during the covid pandemic, opening the door for influencers to push the drug for other ailments to a “captured audience” even without proof it works for those conditions.

“This is really about profit. This is about political identity. This is about creating distrust in the existing biomedical community. This is about money,” Caulfield said in an interview with ABC News, which partnered with ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News to report on ivermectin.

After a hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship earlier this year, unproven claims that ivermectin is effective against the virus have been spread by some popular social media accounts and right-wing figures, including former congresswoman . The World Health Organization says it has seen that shows ivermectin is an effective hantavirus treatment.

Tennessee’s ivermectin bill was shepherded by a Republican supermajority in 2022. Its passage blindsided state medical officials and handed a victory to medical groups that spread covid misinformation.

Some pharmacy websites now offer the drug as a treatment for covid, “long haul vax symptoms,” diabetes, or cancer — despite no evidence of its effectiveness for those purposes — while the largely gives pharmacists immunity from lawsuits or professional sanctions related to ivermectin.

The law was also a harbinger of legislation to come: More than two dozen states have since considered look-alike bills that would make the politicized medication available without a requiring a doctor visit. 

John Mafi, a UCLA internal medicine physician who has studied the rise of ivermectin among cancer patients, worries it will lure people away from proven treatments. He co-authored a new study in prescribing rates for ivermectin and another antiparasitic drug, particularly in the South. The rise followed a January 2025 episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast in which actor Mel Gibson claimed ivermectin and other drugs cured three friends with stage 4 cancer.

“It’s going back to 19th-century quack science,” Mafi said about off-label use of ivermectin. “It is alarming that I’m seeing this really unproven therapy being touted to so many potentially vulnerable Americans.”

The FDA says ivermectin can be . Tennessee has seen a small but concerning rise in signs of overuse. The Tennessee Poison Center, which fields calls from people exposed to drugs or toxic substances, received more than 60 calls for possible ivermectin poisoning in 2025, the most since 2021. They included reports of vomiting, blurred vision, neurological problems, and difficulty walking.

“People are taking this because they just feel unwell. It’s almost like a panacea now,” said Rebecca Bruccoleri, the poison center’s medical director. “I’ve heard rumblings on the internet of using ivermectin for an alternative cancer treatment, and we’re seeing it definitely in here.”

Pharmacist Paul Hughey has dispensed ivermectin under the new law at two Tennessee pharmacies: Mt. Juliet Pharmacy and Compound Rx. He estimated that “up to 20 people in a week” are buying ivermectin but that peak demand was double or triple that amount.

For years, Hughey said in an interview, customers have relayed emotional “testimonies” about the drug healing the sick, “especially with the cancer patients.”

“I’ll get a doctor call in and they say: ‘Guess what. So-and-so is cured.’ And it’s just amazing to hear that. So anybody who doubts that,” Hughey said, “I don’t really know that they’re practicing medicine. I think they’re just following the narrative.”

‘I’ve Taken Bucketloads of This Stuff’

The linchpin of Tennessee’s ivermectin market is , a conservative doctor to the creation of the 2022 ivermectin law. She has with pharmacies across the state empowering them to sell the drug.

Tennessee’s law to dispense ivermectin without a specific prescription for each patient, through a “collaborative pharmacy practice agreement” with a doctor who provides what is functionally a pre-written, nonspecific prescription for all potential customers.

In podcast interviews, Sibley has said she has made as many as 40 of these agreements with Tennessee pharmacies, which she said forward her the paperwork on each ivermectin customer. Before selling the drug, pharmacies are required to ask customers questions about medical conditions and medications that could cause complications if taken with ivermectin. Afterward, the collaborating physician also is expected to receive a record for each person who purchases ivermectin.

“We literally have folks coming from all over the world to get our ivermectin,” Sibley said on in February 2025. “As the collaborator for these pharmacies, I get every person’s sheet.”

“They’re from every state,” she said. “They’re from Canada. They’re from Europe.”

Sibley did not respond to requests for comment.

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News has independently confirmed that Sibley signed agreements with at least 10 pharmacies. The agreements say pharmacists shall dispense ivermectin only in Tennessee, where Sibley is licensed, although one of those pharmacies said friends and family in Tennessee can “.”

Hughey, the Tennessee pharmacist, said Sibley had prescribing agreements ready to go when the law was enacted. He credited her with advancing ivermectin sales throughout the state.

“Had Dr. Sibley not stepped in and really pushed forward, there’s no telling how hard it would have been,” Hughey said. “It would have been a lot less widespread.”

Sibley also works with Children’s Health Defense, the Kennedy-founded group that has become one of the nation’s most influential anti-vaccine organizations. In podcasts, Sibley has referred to the covid vaccine as a “” and “ that’s ever been produced.”

Separately, before Tennessee legislators in 2024 about an alleged plot to change the weather and block sunlight. The New York Times then included her .

Sibley has said in podcast interviews that she was told by God to treat covid patients. She said she has advocated for ivermectin ever since.

“God agrees with what I’m doing,” Sibley said in 2023 on the podcast , which is recorded in Nashville. “I wake up every day and I say: ‘Yes, sir. I’m reporting to duty.’”

In legislative and government hearings throughout 2022, Sibley testified that she had treated around 4,400 people with ivermectin, including some Tennessee lawmakers, all without taking payment. Sibley described ivermectin as “a wonder drug” and said making it more available “.”

“I’ve taken bucketloads of this stuff myself,” Sibley said . “I feel like I’ve been a good test subject.”

Sibley has said she dispenses ivermectin using treatment guidelines developed by Paul Marik, who in 2020 co-founded the Independent Medical Alliance, a medical group that has promoted ivermectin as an effective treatment for , , , and .

Some Tennessee pharmacies now follow those protocols, too. The protocols recommend patients take 1.5 to five times as much ivermectin as is normally prescribed to treat parasites, with the dose taken for days or weeks instead of just once.

Marik and other ivermectin proponents sued the FDA in 2022 after it discouraged the use of the drug for covid by tweeting: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” The agency settled the lawsuit with no admission of wrongdoing and deleted the viral tweet in 2024.

The American Board of Internal Medicine has revoked Sibley’s and Marik’s board certifications but declined to explain why. Sibley still holds a Tennessee medical license; Marik is based in Virginia and is not licensed. Sibley and Marik the internal medicine board’s actions.

In response to questions from ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News, Marik, through an Independent Medical Alliance spokesperson, said medical science benefits from “open discussion of ideas and treatments.”

“Many independent doctors have reported that treatments like Ivermectin, in conjunction with traditional treatments, are showing promise. These ideas should be explored,” alliance spokesperson Lynne Kristensen said in an emailed statement.

Marik testified in favor of Tennessee’s ivermectin legislation in 2022, telling lawmakers that it is necessary because people would otherwise buy animal-grade ivermectin in stronger dosages meant for livestock.

“They’re buying ivermectin from farm stores. We don’t know the quality,” Marik said at a March 2022 legislative hearing on the Tennessee bill. “So this would prevent that from happening.”

Tennessee Does Not Track Its Ivermectin Market

Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, and Texas enacted similar laws in 2025, and legislation that makes ivermectin available without the need for a doctor visit has been introduced or debated in at least 24 other states, according to a ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News analysis. That means half the country could be following Tennessee down an unlit path, because no one knows the full scope of its ivermectin market.

Tennessee does not effectively track which pharmacies offer ivermectin this way, and the state government has been unable to produce some foundational documents that pharmacies are legally required to file before they sell the drug, according to a ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News investigation.

Doctors and pharmacies are the Tennessee Department of Health when they sign agreements that allow ivermectin to be dispensed without patient-specific prescriptions, although it is not clear whether this consistently occurs.

In response to a ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News public records request for those ivermectin notifications filed by pharmacies, the agency over three months produced records from only 12 pharmacies, half of which have agreements with Sibley. The agency said it did not locate records related to at least 13 others that ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News has identified as selling ivermectin without requiring individual prescriptions.

Department of Health spokesperson Dean Flener said the agency would not answer questions about whether or how it regulates ivermectin or the pharmacies that distribute it.

Tennessee has said it does not track how much of the drug is sold in the state, and the amount is not well captured by federal or insurance data sources. That’s because the drug is often sold at compounding pharmacies, which make customized medications that are not FDA-approved and rarely covered by insurance. Drugmakers and wholesalers did not respond to questions about how much ivermectin they supply to pharmacies in the state.

Even the Independent Medical Alliance, one of ivermectin’s , says it doesn’t know how much is flowing through Tennessee.

States are getting pressure from clinicians ”who have had success with the use of ivermectin,” said IMA President Joseph Varon, a physician based in Houston. “That’s what happened in Texas, and that’s what happened in Tennessee.”

‘An Unproven, Potentially Unsafe Drug’

Once signed by Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, the state’s ivermectin law took effect immediately — even before the state’s physician and pharmacy licensing boards created rules to guide the process, which Tennessee law also requires. 

Some board members were shocked.

“We’re talking about an unproven, potentially unsafe drug,” Shant Garabedian, a doctor on the state’s Board of Osteopathic Examination, said of off-label ivermectin use during a . “It’s already law. Somehow it passes without our sort of input.”

In meetings that followed, at least five members of Tennessee’s medical boards voiced concerns about the law beyond safety and efficacy. Some said pharmacists could overcharge for a drug that normally costs pennies per pill. Some worried that a loosely regulated, cash-based ivermectin market might attract shady characters, especially because the law also shields prescribers from ivermectin-related civil lawsuits.

“This involves no clinical engagement,” Melanie Blake, then-president of the Board of Medical Examiners, said during a . “If they’re exempt from liability as well, I hate to think of things that individuals could do just to make money, but this would be one.” 

The boards eventually enacted regulations affirming that ivermectin could be dispensed without any diagnosis. Board members said the law left them no choice.

“This is more of a situation where, legally, the legislature has decided for us,” John McGraw, another board member, said in a . “This has sort of tied our hands in a lot of ways.”

The first known sale under the new law occurred in Sibley’s home of Johnson City, a city of about 74,000 people in northeastern Tennessee. According to a , Sibley entered into a collaborative agreement with pharmacist Josh Harrison at The Compounding Lab, which dispenses drugs for people and animals. 

The first customer was Bernadette Pajer, an anti-vaccine activist who has worked with Children’s Health Defense. In a of the Nashville podcast Rebunked With Scott Armstrong, Pajer said Sibley was a medical adviser for the group and described the first ivermectin sale.

“On that day, she was the doctor, he was the pharmacist making the sale, and I was the first customer,” Pajer said. “So that was pretty cool.”

Ivermectin pharmacies have spread across the state. In the suburbs of Nashville, Roman Pharmacy advertises ivermectin on at least four billboards along Interstate 65, and is mostly focused on the drug. Outside Knoxville, allows customers to order ivermectin for multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease, or “to use it to detoxify.”

Roman Pharmacy did not respond to interview requests. Fresh Pharmacy declined an interview.

In Chattanooga, the Medicine Counter pharmacy says on its website that ivermectin should be taken “only as prescribed by your healthcare provider.” And yet the pharmacy sells some of Tennessee’s available without a prescription from a doctor — up to 21 times as strong as a standard tablet, for nearly $19 per pill — according to the ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News analysis.

Himanshu Patel, Medicine Counter’s head pharmacist, declined to be interviewed. He said in an email that the pharmacy operates in a “very competitive market” and that its strongest pills were below the maximum dose for humans evaluated by the FDA for safety purposes.

And then there is Compound Rx, which, in addition to selling ivermectin in its store, has built a website in preparation to ship nationwide. The site, which is in “test mode,” cannot currently make any sales. It also asks customers how they heard about the pharmacy, with a dropdown menu of answers that features right-wing figures such as Donald Trump Jr., Steve Bannon, Laura Ingraham, and Kevin Sorbo.

Who is not listed as an option? Your doctor.

Hughey, the Compound Rx pharmacist, said he wasn’t involved with the website, which he said may never launch.

The highly concentrated pills are a concern for Tennessee state Sen. Richard Briggs, who worries lawmakers have created a “dangerous” ivermectin market rife with “misleading advertising” about what the drug can actually do.

Briggs, who is a surgeon and the only Republican who voted against the ivermectin bill in 2022, said he planned to introduce legislation to rein in the sale of ivermectin when lawmakers reconvene in 2027.

“But it may be a hard sell, because with the anti-vaxxers and some of these other folks,” Briggs said. “We don’t base a lot of things that we do on science, data, or facts. To a lot of folks in the legislature, the facts are just an inconvenience.”

‘Enough Trouble With Ivermectin’

Lawmakers in at least seven states have considered ivermectin legislation this year, including Alabama, Florida, Oklahoma, and South Carolina. If enacted, these bills would allow people to obtain ivermectin without an individual prescription, like in Tennessee, or make it available over the counter.

Kennedy praised such legislation at an event in Texas last August.

“I think it’s a really good bill,” he said of Texas’ ivermectin legislation, according to . “I think Americans should have the choice.”

But proponents have hit roadblocks. A Utah bill failed to advance out of the state House this year. In Oklahoma, some lawmakers have put up a fight.

“I’m a scientific person. I need to see some research and some data that shows what we’re treating,” Oklahoma state Rep. Cynthia Roe, a Republican and nurse practitioner who opposes the state’s ivermectin bill, said in an interview. “And God forbid somebody start giving it to their kid.”

Back in Tennessee, one of the medical boards that was alarmed when the law was enacted in 2022 started to distance itself from ivermectin altogether.

In January, the Board of Medical Examiners grappled with how to punish Ricky Lee Jackson, a doctor who was licensed in Tennessee and had been sanctioned and fined by Washington state’s medical commission. The Tennessee board normally mirrors punishments from other states without hesitation. But the Washington case centered on Jackson prescribing ivermectin for covid, which in Tennessee no longer required a patient to see a doctor.

After a debate, the board voted to reprimand Jackson — but told its staff to ensure the public record made .

“This board has been in enough trouble with ivermectin,” member Keith Anderson said, according to a . “Maybe we ought to just leave that out.”

journalist Blake Farmer and reporter Adam Friedman contributed to this report.

This <a target="_blank" href="/health-industry/ivermectin-pharmacies-tennessee-anti-vaccine-doctor-denise-sibley/">article</a&gt; first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="">KFF Health News</a> and is republished here under a <a target="_blank" href=" Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src="/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2023/04/kffhealthnews-icon.png?w=150&quot; style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner discussed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s position on antidepressants on WAMU’s 1A on June 10.

• .

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News journalist Rae Ellen Bichell discussed, on WBUR’s Here & Now on June 10, a recent investigation that found immigration facilities aren’t providing adequate medical care.

• .
• Read Bichell’s “Festering Infections to Untreated Cancer: ICE Detainees Describe Medical Neglect Across US,” reported with Maia Rosenfeld and Renuka Rayasam and in collaboration with The Associated Press.

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News national public health correspondent Amy Maxmen discussed the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show on June 9.

• .
• Read Maxmen’s “‘We Live With Fear’: In Congo, Doctors Face Ebola With Little Protection.”

Céline Gounder, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News’ editor-at-large for public health, discussed on Fox’s LiveNow on June 8 how public health experts are preparing for the World Cup.

• .

Elisabeth Rosenthal, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News’ senior contributing editor for health news analysis and author of the bestseller An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back, discussed the challenges of reforming the American healthcare system on NBC’s Dateline on June 5.

• .

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The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released on June 1. That deadline was set last year in the GOP tax-and-spending law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which established a work requirement for certain people enrolled in Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for people with low incomes or disabilities.

Medicaid agencies are scrambling to rework IT systems and make sure they have staff to effectively enforce the rules, while also keeping enrollees from losing coverage for administrative reasons, such as difficulty navigating state eligibility portals.

The newly announced regulations offer a clearer picture of what roughly will have to do to prove they qualify for benefits.

Jim Torres, who helps people enroll in health coverage at the Samuel U. Rodgers Health Center in Kansas City, Missouri, said a “very small percentage” of his clients have heard of the changes coming to Medicaid.

“These folks have very busy lives. They’re doing the best they can to get by,” he said. “It’s just not a top-of-mind thing for most of them.”

Health policy researchers and consumer advocates said enrollees should keep a few things in mind as the Jan. 1, 2027, rollout approaches in most states.

1. The work rules won’t apply to everyone.

The new rules will apply to people covered through what’s known as . Since 2014, more than 40 states and the District of Columbia have decided to allow more people into their Medicaid programs, generally low-income adults without dependents. Georgia and Wisconsin offer coverage to some people in this group, so they’ll be subject to the rules.

Children and pregnant people, as well as individuals with disabilities who receive Social Security payments — all groups that already qualify for Medicaid — won’t be subject to the rules. Nor will people determined to be “medically frail,” or too sick to work.

People subject to the work rules are “crowding out” people in the Medicaid program who are “truly in need,” CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz claimed during a June 1 press call. “Work requirements are going to turn this around, we hope.”

The rules are set to take effect in most places in January. Nebraska started enforcing them in May. Montana plans to start in July but won’t kick people off until October. Arkansas will do a in July — it will start enforcing the rules but with no penalties until next year.

2. States will take your word that you’re too sick to work. For now.

Federal officials have stressed that states should make the process of reporting hours and requesting exemptions as simple as possible for Medicaid enrollees by creating automated systems and using existing data sources, such as unemployment and education records.

If states cannot determine you’re performing 80 hours of qualifying activities a month using those data sources, you may be allowed to “self-attest” to that in 2027, health policy researchers said.

People will also be allowed to “self-attest” that they are too sick to work in 2027, and do so one time in 2028. Then states will start asking for proof, if they can’t find it through available data.

But after the initial rollout, the burden of proof is likely to still fall on many enrollees, said researchers and consumer advocates.

People may need to dig up pay stubs, medical records, and doctors’ notes and submit them for state review, said Morgan Henderson, who has studied Medicaid work programs in Georgia and Arkansas at The Hilltop Institute, a research center at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

“The higher this manual reporting burden, the less people are going to do it,” he said. “That means that we’re going to see coverage drop-offs.”

3. The rules are tougher than expected for people too sick to work.

One of CMS’ primary goals has been to “protect vulnerable populations” through “strong exemptions to make sure people who can’t reasonably be expected to work are not subject to the requirements,” Dan Brillman, a deputy administrator at the agency, said during the June 1 press call.

Consumer and patient advocates, however, said the final rules’ exemptions are more restrictive than expected. Enrollees will eventually have to provide documentation, such as a statement from a medical professional, to prove that a health condition keeps them from working. And each individual state will have to determine the severity of beneficiaries’ medical conditions.

“Someone could be medically frail in Nebraska but not medically frail in Delaware,” said Carolyn Sheridan, associate director of state policy for the National Organization for Rare Disorders, which lobbies for patients with rare diseases. She said her group had hoped the rules would offer a standardized definition of who counted as medically frail and not leave the decision up to states.

Trump administration officials have publicly crusaded against fraud in government health programs, such as Medicaid, and states could face financial penalties for incorrectly granting people exemptions from the work rules, said Jennifer Tolbert, who researches Medicaid at KFF, a health information nonprofit that includes ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News.

“States may be more cautious,” she said. “That will likely lead to people losing coverage who may still be eligible.”

4. Only certain qualifying activities count.

Enrollees can satisfy the rules by working 80 hours a month. They can also be enrolled in college courses, volunteer through a community organization, or do “in-kind” work that doesn’t result in pay.

The rules set out, in detail, how many academic credit hours translate to 80 hours a month — students need to be enrolled in six credit hours per semester to meet the “half-time” requirement. An unpaid internship can count toward the 80 hours.

People can also prove they’re volunteering with “a document from a community service organization.”

Consumer advocates say it might be hard for people to obtain proof they’re performing these kinds of informal activities. But supporters of the rules say volunteerism can already be tracked.

“If you run into trouble with the law and the judge says, ‘Hey, you need some volunteering and community service to serve your time,’ there are already ways that we verify that,” said Niklas Kleinworth, who works on state health policy for the conservative Paragon Institute.

5. You have time to prepare.

Make sure your state Medicaid agency has your current mailing address and keep your eye on your mailbox, said researchers and consumer advocates. State Medicaid agencies must inform you in two ways if you’ll be subject to the rules — by either regular mail or email, and by one other form of communication, such as a text or phone call or by posting a notice online.

“The important stuff comes by mail,” Henderson said.

And check in with your state Medicaid agency, said researchers and advocates. Some states, including , , and , have already posted information about the work rules on their websites. If you can’t find what you’re looking for there, visit or . A caseworker should be able to tell you whether you’ll be subject to the rules.

“Get ahead of this,” said Joan Alker, who is executive director of the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families and studies Medicaid. “So that you don’t end up going to the pharmacy one day and they say, ‘Oh, you’re not insured anymore’ when you’re trying to get your prescriptions refilled.”

ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News correspondent Samantha Liss and senior correspondent Rachana Pradhan contributed to this report.

Have you tried to prove your eligibility for Medicaid under new rules that require people to show they are working, going to school, or participating in another qualifying activity? Click here to contact ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News.

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Julie Rovner ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News Read Julie's stories. Julie Rovner is chief Washington correspondent and host of ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News’ weekly health policy news podcast, "What the Health?" A noted expert on health policy issues, Julie is the author of the critically praised reference book "Health Care Politics and Policy A to Z," now in its third edition.

When Congress failed to extend the covid-era enhanced subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, many experts predicted millions of people would lose coverage because they would be unable to make payments toward the higher premiums. It has taken a few months, but that prediction seems to be coming true.

Meanwhile, controversy in the medical community about how — or whether  â€” to work with the Trump administration burst into the open at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association, as members who were handing out an editorial criticizing the administration’s cuts to biomedical research were evicted from the event, prompting a backlash.

This week’s panelists are Julie Rovner of ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News, Lizzy Lawrence of Stat, Sandhya Raman of Bloomberg Law, and Lauren Weber of The Washington Post.

Panelists

Lizzy Lawrence Stat

Sandhya Raman Bloomberg Law

Lauren Weber The Washington Post

Among the takeaways from this week’s episode:

• A from The Commonwealth Fund highlights enrollment declines in Affordable Care Act marketplaces, a trend experts predicted when Congress did not renew the enhanced ACA tax credits at the end of 2025. As consumers continue to struggle with rising costs for groceries, gas, and other expenses, individuals who lost that additional financial assistance to purchase health insurance may be facing higher premium costs and more out-of-pocket expenses.
• Concerns over the difficulty of implementing the administration’s Medicaid work requirements, along with potential legal challenges, may mean the regulations could be delayed or even reversed. For example, doctor and patient groups contend that the requirement that physicians determine whether each individual can work the required 80 hours per month will create unintended consequences, such as paperwork and bureaucratic hassles, for patients and their doctors, rather than decrease fraud in the program.
• On Capitol Hill, fewer days in session and more days on the midterm campaign trail, plus a lack of bipartisanship, likely mean that lawmakers may be less willing to find a path forward to strengthen the financial solvency of the Medicare and Social Security trust funds. The programs’ annual trustees’ report found that the two entitlement programs, which provide benefits to millions of people, will technically become insolvent in 2033. In recent years, lawmakers have been inclined to act only when facing an imminent deadline rather than taking action to avoid a future problem.
• Leaders of the American Diabetes Association apologized for having security escort several doctors and researchers, including the editor-in-chief of the association’s flagship medical journal and a past president of the ADA, from the group’s annual research meeting for distributing a journal editorial criticizing the administration’s cuts to biomedical research. The incident highlighted how fearful some nonprofit leaders are of taking on the Trump administration.

Also this week, Rovner interviews KFF’s Tricia Neuman, who is retiring this month as a senior vice president and the executive director of the Program on Medicare Policy. 

Plus, for “extra credit,” the panelists suggest health policy stories they read this week they think you should read, too:

Julie Rovner: ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News’ “Anguished Parents. Doctors in Tears. Utah’s Long Measles Outbreak Takes a Toll,” by Amy Maxmen.

Sandhya Raman: CIDRAP’s “,” by Liz Szabo.

Lizzy Lawrence: The Chicago Tribune’s “,” by Christy Gutowski and Gregory Royal Pratt.

Lauren Weber: ProPublica’s “,” by Annie Waldman.

Also mentioned in this week’s podcast:

• Politico’s “,” by Alice Miranda Ollstein and Robert King.
• The New York Times’ “,” by Sheryl Gay Stolberg.
• MedPage Today’s “,” by Kristina Fiore and Kristen Monaco.
• Stat’s “,” by Anil Oza.
• Fierce Healthcare’s “,” by Paige Minemyer.
• Stat’s “, Federal Investigators Find,” by Casey Ross and Bob Herman.

Credits

Click here to find all our podcasts.

And subscribe to “What the Health? From ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News” on , , , , , or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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He also had holdings in Altria and a third leading tobacco company, though an apparent discrepancy in his disclosures clouds the extent of his investments. In 2025, tobacco interests donated $6 million to MAGA Inc., a super PAC that supports the president, and Trump’s inauguration. And, on April 30, a week before FDA guidance that provided a critical boost to the industry, Reynolds American dropped an additional $5 million into the super PAC’s coffers.

The stock trades and political contributions occurred as the Trump administration pursued a broadly pro-tobacco agenda: Its FDA piloted a fast-track program to approve nicotine pouches. It unveiled a program to allow vapes on the market more rapidly, despite resistance from career civil servants and leadership, culminating this year in guidance waving through flavored electronic cigarettes. It cut public health employees focusing on anti-tobacco policy. And it broadened enforcement against illicit e-cigarettes, competitors to the big industry players with a financial relationship to Trump.

It amounts to the most pro-tobacco, pro-nicotine presidency in some time — a remarkable policy given the tens of millions of deaths cigarettes caused during the 20th century. Even in recent years, anti-smoking groups say a half-million Americans a year die from cigarettes. Industry advocates say the toll helps justify a shift to e-cigarettes and nicotine pouches, which they say are less harmful. However, public health advocates say these products carry their own risks, such as addiction.

Lawmakers and public health leaders have criticized the recent FDA guidance and approvals as a “” that ignored scientific evidence to deliver what investment analysts have described as “very positive” steps for influential tobacco companies.

The scale of the money is “unprecedented and problematic,” said Brian King, who was pushed out of the FDA’s tobacco office last April and now works as an executive at the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. He fears that steering public policy toward tobacco — still addictive and harmful to health — puts Americans at risk.

“It’s a gift on a platter with a side of public health malpractice,” he said.

The White House did not comment on the president’s investments or industry donations to MAGA Inc. Spokesperson Kush Desai said, “The only guiding factor behind the Trump administration’s health policymaking is Gold Standard Science. FDA’s regulatory treatment of nicotine pouches and vapes is rooted in recent evidence that has found that these products can help adults quit smoking.”

Philip Morris disputed any connection. Company representatives “regularly attend events and forums where we share our commitment to improving public health in the United States,” spokesperson Samuel Dashiell said, “starting with providing better options to America’s 45 million legal-age nicotine consumers.”

“We do not comment on individual engagements or on the personal financial matters or disclosures of public officials,” he added.

Other tobacco companies whose stock Trump has bought and sold during his second term or that donated to groups aligned with Trump — Juul, Reynolds American, and Altria — did not respond to requests for comment.

The financial stakes are huge. Investment analysts at Goldman Sachs say the newer products, touted as safer, make more money per sale than traditional cigarettes. Philip Morris expects Zyn pouches, for example, to make eight times the gross profits of its cigarettes, Goldman Sachs analysts said in March 2025.

When he ran for his second term, Trump promoted himself as a pro-tobacco candidate, posting that he had and that President Joe Biden and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris “want everything banned.”

Since late 2023, MAGA Inc. has received over $20 million in funding from the industry, federal campaign records show. Trump’s inauguration garnered nearly $4 million more. His ballroom project donations of an unknown amount from Altria and Reynolds American.

Recent Trump administration actions show he’s followed through with his campaign rhetoric. In May, the FDA released that allows manufacturers to market their vapes and nicotine pouches while awaiting agency approval. It also approved several vaping products. The month before, the Vapor Technology Association, which donated $1.25 million to Trump’s inauguration, it had met with the White House to discuss its concerns.

By that point, Trump had gone on a stock-purchasing spree. In March he made eight separate purchases of Philip Morris or Altria stock, worth as much as $275,000, according to a disclosure form that bears Trump’s signature.

It is difficult to be precise about Trump’s tobacco investments, because the financial disclosures show only ranges of investment amounts. They also have an apparent discrepancy. In January, the president sold $500,000 to $1,000,000 in Altria stock. But that’s confusing because previous disclosures didn’t show Trump held that much equity in Altria. The White House declined to comment on the matter.

The FDA’s May guidance and approvals drew condemnation from public health leaders, who worry that the agency is allowing products with flavors especially appealing to young people. “After years of recognizing the dangers flavored e-cigarettes pose to youth, it is deeply troubling to see FDA ignore the scientific evidence and reverse course,” American Lung Association CEO Harold Wimmer said .

“I think it’s blatantly illegal, both on its merits and also procedurally, because it was issued as a final guidance without even giving the public an opportunity to comment on it,” said Mitch Zeller, a former head of the FDA’s tobacco center.

A group of Democratic senators called the decision a “a free pass to addictive and harmful vapes” in letters to Reynolds American and Altria. It would lead to “a lucrative payday after years of unsuccessful legislative and regulatory efforts to weaken federal tobacco oversight,” they concluded.

Members of Congress are barred from insider trading, and many legislators would like to see trading of individual company stocks banned for all members. In the wake of Trump’s most recent financial disclosures, with revelations that he often traded in companies manufacturing GLP-1 drugs before his administration steered policy in a favorable direction, some members are calling for the president, too, to be barred from stock trading.

Trump’s tobacco policies have garnered favorable grades from investors. At Goldman Sachs, bankers described the May FDA guidance as “very positive” for Philip Morris and “a significant step in the FDA’s positioning toward enforcement and acceptance of nic pouch (as well as e-vapor) innovation generally.”

And Barclays analysts said the FDA’s guidance was good news for Juul, a leading vape producer. (In November, the company contributed $1 million to MAGA Inc.)

FDA resistance to speeding up approvals for these products reportedly contributed to the ouster of agency commissioner Marty Makary, who did not respond to requests for comment. According to and , the White House repeatedly intervened in the approval process.

“I served during the entire first Trump administration as center director, and there was never any pressure from any political appointee at FDA, at HHS, or the White House when it came to application review,” Zeller said.

But recent changes in FDA policy can be traced to the access tobacco firms have had to the White House, he said.

By and large, the Trump administration has delivered on industry priorities. Soon after the inauguration — which tobacco companies had donated heavily to — the administration withdrew a Biden-era proposal to ban menthol cigarettes. The administration has eased the path for nicotine pouches like Zyn, which were first approved under Biden. Investment analysts viewed government crackdowns on illicit e-cigarettes positively: Barclays wrote in January that “company commentary on enforcement has also been upbeat, suggesting that the tide could begin to turn in favour of the legal players in the market.”

What’s more, the Trump administration’s government layoffs have decimated public health’s tobacco control offices. The work of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s office of smoking has been sharply curtailed; its flagship “Tips From Former Smokers” campaign, which seeks to persuade viewers not to smoke, has been off the air for months, King said.

“It’s not difficult to see that less dollars invested in prevention and control is going to lead to more tobacco product use and tobacco-related disease,” King said, especially given the government’s decades-long success in reducing cigarette usage.

The shift is particularly ironic given the administration’s focus — through its Make America Healthy Again slogan — on chronic disease. “Attempting to combat chronic disease without tobacco control is like attempting a triathlon without a bicycle: You are destined for failure before leaving the starting line,” King concluded.

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“Bemotrizinol has been used safely in Europe for decades,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about the approval. “FDA’s action will increase competition and consumer confidence in sunscreen products.”

Nonprofits that advocate for health, such as the Environmental Working Group, and the skin care industry alike had lobbied for approval of the ingredient, which makes sunscreens sheerer and lighter on the skin than many available American options while blocking a wider spectrum of ultraviolet rays that can cause premature aging and skin cancer.

The newly approved sunscreen filter will allow companies to reformulate sunscreens to address consumers’ concerns, said Carl D’Ruiz, a senior manager at , a Swiss maker of sunscreen chemicals that applied for the FDA approval. In addition to allowing companies to offer what the FDA calls safe and effective formulations, he said, the approval will allow sunscreens that are more like sought-after South Korean brands to be sold in the U.S. by autumn.

Confidence in U.S. sunscreen has faltered on two fronts: among those concerned about what’s in the sunscreens they use and those who believe sun exposure is healthy. But will the new ingredient win the trust of Make America Healthy Again skeptics and Gen Zers intentionally tanning? RFK Jr., strikingly bronzed, has helped stoke this confusion by pledging in 2024 to fight what he called the FDA’s “war on public health” and . Under his leadership, the FDA from a plan in March to ban people under 18 from using tanning beds.

All this matters because by age 70 in the United States. It is the in the nation, where about 3.3 million people are diagnosed each year with basal and squamous cell carcinomas.

D’Ruiz said he thinks bemotrizinol, also known as BEMT, will change the dynamic. “People will talk more positively about sunscreens,” he said.

In the U.S., new sunscreen chemicals are regulated as over-the-counter drugs like aspirin or cough syrup rather than as cosmetics, as in Japan and the European Union. That means they face more elaborate testing and safety protocols, such as animal testing that runs afoul of EU laws, which is why the for bemotrizinol took nearly two decades, D’Ruiz said.

What’s “generally recognized as safe and effective,” otherwise known as “GRASE” in FDA-speak, is at the center of the American sunscreen debate. Bemotrizinol joins zinc oxide and titanium dioxide on the FDA’s .

That could help rebuild trust, said , an environmental epidemiologist at the , a nonprofit that researches the ingredients in consumer products.

“It has strong safety data,” Friedman said. “The documents submitted to the FDA to achieve ‘generally recognized as safe and effective’ include tests of irritation, sensitization to allergies, two-year animal studies for carcinogenicity, and reproductive health.”

The approval will also give consumers access to sunscreens that don’t leave as much of a white cast, she said, which makes some people hesitant to use mineral sunscreens such as zinc oxide and titanium dioxide.

Bemotrizinol’s approval won’t change the possibility of several chemicals with unclear safety profiles being added to sunscreens.

In 2019, the there was insufficient data to support a positive “generally recognized as safe and effective” determination for 12 commonly used sunscreen chemicals.

The concerns emerged after the that said some sunscreen ingredients had been found in humans’ bloodstreams. Though the industry has since phased out several of those chemicals lacking GRASE status, four are still widely used: avobenzone, homosalate, octisalate, and octinoxate.

“The European Union had that homosalate was not safe at concentrations that they were using and recommended a very low percentage — which was effectively a ban,” Friedman said. “The U.K. also issued a safety evaluation.”

Octisalate and octinoxate have been associated with disruption of the endocrine system, and octinoxate was due to concerns that it harms marine life and bleaches coral reefs.

Avobenzone breaks down when exposed to light, making it less effective, Friedman said, and has been associated with allergic reactions.

Mark Mitchnick, a pediatrician who , which is known under the brand Z-Cote, said bemotrizinol will give chemists a new tool to make sunscreens that people will want to wear.

“It’s a good UVA block,” he said. “It gives us good flexibility. In my mind, it allows you to make really good products without using avobenzone, which I think has a lot of baggage.”

Most of the UV rays people are exposed to are UVA rays that can penetrate the middle layer of the skin and cause up to 90% of skin aging, along with a smaller amount of UVB rays, which are . falls on the electromagnetic spectrum between X-rays and visible light.

Mitchnick said major companies have used chemical filters because they work better on a per-pound basis compared with mineral sunscreens made with zinc oxide and titanium dioxide. “That’s why hybrids are great — you get the best of both worlds.” He said he expects companies, including , to release hybrid products containing bemotrizinol and zinc oxide later this year.

J. Frank Nash, a senior director and research fellow at Procter & Gamble, said skepticism about sunscreen is unfortunate because properly formulated sunscreens do an excellent job blocking solar UV, “which we know is responsible for skin cancers and aging.”

He worries the industry has contributed to the trust gap by , called boosters, to mineral sunscreens, to raise sun protection factor ratings, or SPF. This leads consumers to wonder what’s in the products they’re buying.

Still, in Australia, where bemotrizinol has been used in sunscreens for years, a shows that even when regulators allow lauded UV filters, bad actors can taint a whole industry.

“People are not shunning sunscreen because they have stopped believing UV is dangerous,” said Joseph Mizikovsky, a director of the . “They are shunning it because they have lost trust in what is in the bottle.”

He applauds the FDA’s transparency with American consumers about the lack of safety data for filters without GRASE status, and FDA’s insistence on mandatory microbial testing of products.

But he said the FDA could do more to rebuild trust in sunscreens.

“My view is the FDA should move faster to ban filters that are missing safety data, and the public should focus on physical protection — shade, clothing, hats, sunglasses — with sunscreen as the last layer, not the first.”

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Dowse wore a full-body protective suit with a plastic face mask. As a pediatrician in southern Utah, he couldn’t risk getting even a mild infection, because many of his patients are babies too young for measles vaccines or children whose parents choose not to protect them with immunizations. “I went in looking like a scientist in E.T.,” he said.

Measles can cause brain damage, deafness, or death in newborns. If the baby entered the world with a measles rash and fever, Dowse was prepared to give the infant a spinal tap to assess the risk of neurological damage.

Luckily, flushed and crying, the baby looked healthy. To keep it that way, Dowse wanted to inject the baby with concentrated antibodies against the measles virus. To his surprise, the parents objected, promising to give their child “all kinds of vitamin A,” Dowse said. He begged them not to, saying, “You can’t see it on the surface, but the baby’s body is fighting the measles.” They were afraid of vaccines, so Dowse explained that antibodies were different and that they would stop measles from replicating in the infant.

“That shot is going to basically give the baby ammo to fight,” Dowse said.

The parents relented. A couple of days later, they left the hospital with a child who had narrowly skirted an infection that killed many thousands of babies a century ago. Nonetheless, Dowse said he doubted they would be returning for childhood vaccinations to protect their baby against a bevy of illnesses. Like more than a dozen Utah doctors and health officials who spoke with ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News, Dowse has adjusted his expectations.

He is part of a reluctant cohort of medical professionals now on the front line of America’s regressive next chapter in health history, one in which dangerous and preventable diseases return.

“I wish that people could see what I see,” said Nathan Money, a hospital pediatrician in Utah whose eyes welled up with tears as he described children he’s treated for measles struggling to breathe. “This train is going in the wrong direction, and it can feel like a helpless situation, because we’re just not seeing the public messaging and leadership that’s needed to turn this around.”

Since measles was deemed eliminated in the U.S. a quarter century ago, public health workers have extinguished sporadic outbreaks in close-knit, undervaccinated communities with targeted methods: Isolate people with measles and quarantine their contacts to contain the virus. But as vaccination rates , the virus is moving beyond insulated communities, overwhelming public health departments constrained by shoestring budgets. Larger outbreaks, the kind not seen for a generation, have forced health officials into a new paradigm: They have stopped racing to “contain” infections and shifted gears into what they call “mitigation.”

Utah made that transition early this year, once the outbreak hit “a point where you no longer have control over it,” said state epidemiologist Leisha Nolen. By March, measles had been detected in every health jurisdiction in the state and in northern Arizona. More than 950 people have tested positive in the two states since the outbreak began in August, but many people with measles haven’t been tested. A of measles viruses suggested that the true number of cases last year could have been 6.5 times what was known.

Last year under President Donald Trump, U.S. measles cases exceeded 2,000 for the first time since 1992. Six months into 2026, the U.S. has already surpassed that threshold. Prolonged outbreaks exact a toll on children, who have spent days in hospitals for severe infections and missed weeks of school for mild ones. Adults with measles miss work. Parents delay daycare to keep their babies safe. Doctors in Utah have enacted labor-intensive protocols to keep measles from spreading in clinics. Newborns and people with weakened immune systems who have been exposed to the virus receive infusions of concentrated antibodies costing $500 to $1,000. Medical visits for measles . Health departments spend millions trying to curb infections.

“This is like a snowball that gathers speed as it rolls downhill,” said Emilie Morris, a hospital pediatrician in Salt Lake County and Utah County. A full-throttle campaign to educate communities on the safety of vaccines and the diseases they prevent could turn the situation around, doctors and health officials said. It would require an effort similar to what the anti-vaccine movement has long done in videos, blogs, and podcasts. For example, the anti-vaccine organization that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. founded before taking the helm at the Department of Health and Human Services, Children’s Health Defense, visits , , and has bought that downplay the threat of viruses while wildly exaggerating the risk of vaccine side effects. Kennedy’s and as health secretary are adding to parents’ doubt.

After the development of vaccines and antibiotics in the mid-1900s, virologist and Nobel laureate Frank Macfarlane Burnet wrote, “One can think of the middle of the twentieth century as the end of one of the most important social revolutions in history, the virtual elimination of the infectious diseases as a significant factor in social life.”

He couldn’t have imagined what was coming.

‘Year of Sickness’

In communities nestled among the red sandstone cliffs and riparian forests of southern Utah, measles took hold last summer. At the main school in Hildale, a town along the Arizona border, just 30% of kindergartners are considered adequately immunized by Utah’s health department, meaning they’ve gotten recommended vaccines against measles, tetanus, polio, and more. Exemptions from childhood vaccine requirements are easily acquired in the state: Parents need only claim personal, religious, or medical reasons.

Many people in Hildale and the surrounding towns are connected to the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a sect that has been leery of the government since a police raid in 1953 separated polygamous parents from their children. Shirlee Draper, a southern Utah resident who grew up in the faith, said they became ever more isolated in the early 2000s under the leadership of Warren Jeffs. Before he was sentenced to life in prison for sexual assault against minors, Jeffs instructed his followers to withdraw from public schools and mainstream medicine.

“Growing up, we all got our vaccines,” said Draper, who left the group during Jeffs’ reign. “It wasn’t until Warren Jeffs came along that there started to be more and more resistance.”

After Jeffs went to prison, many people left the faith but remained concerned about vaccines because of online misinformation, such as claims that the shots are toxic. Today a small shop in Hildale sells mouth sprays and oral drops professing to detoxify vaccines. Water, glycerin, and “whole grain alcohol” are listed as ingredients in one called Vxx-Dtx.

A mother who ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News agreed not to name, because she fears stigmatization, said she considered getting her kids vaccinated when schools in southwest Utah started seeing measles cases last summer. She had split from the fundamentalist group but still worried about vaccines giving her children autism or other complications. in top-tier scientific journals have refuted a link between vaccines and autism, but the anti-vaccine movement has kept the notion alive.

Then the woman’s son told her that his classmate had a rash and spit on him, she said. A few days later, he fell ill with a fever, followed by vomiting, diarrhea, and a head-to-toe rash.

“He felt downright sick for 10 to 14 days,” the woman said. “It was hard to see the end of the tunnel.”

Then her daughters came down with measles. She had a fleeting case, too, even though she had been vaccinated as a child. Breakthrough infections and are relatively rare. Only 4% of reported this year and last have been among people who’ve had two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.

By the time the family recovered, the son had missed nearly three weeks of school, the daughters a month, and the mother had postponed an important family gathering because she didn’t want to spread infections. “I just got my youngest’s missed-school report and it’s super high,” she said. “This is the year of sickness.”

The woman said she regretted not getting her kids vaccinated when the outbreak started. She said she knows about 30 people who have fallen sick with the measles. Except for a few who needed medical care, they haven’t been tested. “I bet there’s been thousands of cases,” she said.

Measles doesn’t have a cure. She and others have tried to ease symptoms with cod liver oil, vitamin C, zinc, and “essential oils,” plant extracts long used in folk medicine that have become a lucrative industry in Utah. People in southwest Utah are trying a lot of things: One resident sells homemade lotion on Facebook, writing, “Breastmilk & Honey has been a life saver for the measles rash.”

Beyond Containment

The outbreak may have started among a fundamentalist community, but it’s spread far beyond because Utah’s vaccination rates have dropped steadily since the covid pandemic. Fewer than 80% of kindergartners in the 2024-25 school year in southwest Utah, with only 87% adequately immunized in the state as a whole — far below the 95% threshold required for herd immunity.

Several Utahns told ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News that “alternative health” or “wellness” drives the trend, rather than religion. The state has a thriving supplement industry, , aided by deregulatory policies supported by the late Utah senator Orrin Hatch and a high concentration of people who earn income from multilevel marketing. These networks of people sell supplements, essential oils, peptides, and other alternative therapies on social media, YouTube, and podcasts, according to and .

Alternative health isn’t necessarily anti-vaccine, but many people who sell unconventional remedies online and in podcasts and mainstream medicine.

“People are suspicious, and it’s well founded,” Draper said. She described dismissive doctors, exorbitant medical bills, hospital systems that over care, and pharmaceutical companies that drove . Communities already wary of government authorities are poised to interpret failings in American healthcare as signs that medical authorities aren’t to be trusted, either, she said.

“Across America, we have entire populations who find safety in clinging to whatever confirms their deeply held beliefs,” she said.

A mistrustful disposition gave way to covid conspiracy theories in 2020 and 2021. In southwest Utah, for example, a tricked out with digital billboards showed up to covid vaccination sites to advertise Plandemic, a rife with , including that masks “activate” the coronavirus and that global elites planned covid-19 to control the population. Misinformation added fuel to anger about public health rules, and there was political backlash under the umbrella of a largely Republican “medical freedom” movement. Utah enacted laws reining in public health, including one that eases exemptions to childhood vaccinations and another that prohibits most employers from requiring vaccines.

In the wake of the covid backlash, health officials tread lightly. Rather than enforce containment measures, “we give our advice and focus on personal responsibility,” said David Heaton, public information officer at the Southwest Utah Public Health Department.

One of the most contagious diseases in the world, measles spreads with astonishing speed among the unvaccinated. One of a New York school outbreak in 1974 found that a second-grader with measles infected 28 other students in 14 classrooms because measles can spread through ventilation systems.

As cases doubled then quadrupled in southern Utah, the regional health department couldn’t keep up with calling the contacts of everyone infected. It shifted its efforts to announcements guiding the public at large. For example, it asks people to call before showing up to clinics with measles symptoms. Still, patients in plenty of hospitals have been exposed. For example, when parents brought a sick, unvaccinated child to a large pediatric hospital in Utah in September, they shared the space with 11 infants too young to be vaccinated. Doctors rushed to give the babies infusions of antibodies and they remained healthy, according to a .

On the radio and in posts on social media, Heaton warns that measles is spreading and that vaccines are the best defense. “If you’re not immunized and you’re anywhere in public,” Heaton said, “you’re fair game for this virus.”

The department doesn’t have the capacity to talk with people directly in the five counties it serves. For a few years, it leaned on community health workers who went to churches, town halls, and other gathering places, listening to people’s concerns and telling them what the science said about covid, vaccines, and other matters of public health. But these workers were laid off early last year, after the Trump administration clawed back more than $12 billion in federal public health grants to states.

“We were starting to get a little bit of traction,” Heaton said of the community workers. “And then we lost all of our team.”

The department offers free measles vaccines to children, but uptake is slow. Nursing director Mindy Bundy said that when she started the job 20 years ago, demand was so high that she would give parents tickets while they waited, as if they were crowding around a deli counter.

“Now even in an outbreak,” she said, “we aren’t seeing a huge increase of people wanting vaccination.”

As officials tried to do the best they could, the outbreak spread north, hopping from one undervaccinated community to the next. When health officials in Utah County spoke with people who had tested positive, they often had no connection to other known cases. “Pretty quickly, we started to lose the links,” said Michael Leman, the county health department’s nursing director. Contact tracing, the cornerstone of containment, was failing.

Every week, the state health department posted a growing list of locations on its website — a Trader Joe’s, a Mormon temple, an aquarium, preschools — that people had visited while contagious. But many people who tested positive hadn’t been to those places, Leman said. “They could have gotten it at Walmart. They could have gotten it walking through a mall,” he said. “I mean, just anywhere in the public they could have been exposed.”

In February, high school students throughout Utah tested positive after a state wrestling tournament at Utah Valley University in Orem. A dashboard monitoring measles viruses in wastewater lit up with notifications around the state. “Wrestling really feels like our turning point,” said Nicholas Rupp, communications director at the Salt Lake County Health Department.

Salt Lake County’s shift from containment to mitigation meant prioritizing high-risk situations and relaxing control everywhere else. When a student has a confirmed case, for example, health officials meet with the school nurse to figure out which kids are most vulnerable. Unvaccinated children in the same classroom as someone infected are asked to stay home for 21 days, but those in other classrooms might not be, said Melanie Crossland, an epidemiologist at the Salt Lake health department. Some schools with high vaccination rates have opted to monitor student temperatures daily instead of requesting quarantines. One school created a separate space for the unvaccinated.

Crossland said such bespoke strategies entail a “huge” amount of effort but have staved off blowback that deflated her during covid.

“We give everything when we’re here,” she said, “but the days of killing ourselves, when legislatively no one is going to give us any help, are done.”

Daycare Dilemma

The outbreak has lasted so long that some children who have recovered from measles have since been hospitalized for what should be mild illnesses from common bugs, said Kerri Smith, a hospital pediatrician in southwest Utah. Measles can , impairing a body’s ability to fight other viruses. “It’s making children very susceptible to getting sick again,” Smith said.

Her eyes were bloodshot, and she looked drained from a week of long shifts. Since the outbreak began, she’s treated more than a dozen babies and children severely sick from measles.

“They’re usually admitted to the hospital with measles pneumonia, so they’re struggling to breathe, pulling for air below their ribs,” she said. “High fevers, 104 to 105, absolutely miserable, extremely fatigued, really dehydrated with sunken eyes.” Most children fully recover from measles, but a fraction develop permanent , a small percentage die, and in , measles kills a person years after the infection.

No one has died so far in Utah’s outbreak. And barring that tragic outcome, Smith and other doctors said, some parents fail to grasp the gravity of measles, even as their own children have tubes inserted into their small nostrils to deliver oxygen. Despite repeated warnings, doctors said, some unvaccinated family members of patients — who could be contagious — walk around the hospital while visiting their loved one. This means the waiting room, the elevator, the cafeteria, and other places need to be shut down for cleaning, and vulnerable people alerted.

“People don’t realize how easily this spreads,” Smith said.

Morris, the pediatrician working in two counties, recalled a conversation with a nonchalant father who didn’t seem to understand the need for quarantine. “I know this is an inconvenience to you,” she said. “It’s also a huge inconvenience to the parent who has an infant who could be severely impacted by this disease.”

On top of feeling depleted, doctors with young children said they are anxious. Emily Chin, a physician in Salt Lake County, worries she’ll bring measles home to her newborn. One evening, she sat in her garage after caring for a child with a rash. The patient’s measles test was still being processed, so Chin isolated herself in a room for the night, wearing an N95 mask instead of holding her infant.

Like many mothers in Utah, Chin plans to give her baby an early dose of the measles vaccine at 6 months old because of the outbreak, in addition to two doses at ages 1 and 4. Several mothers said they avoid travel and public places because they fear their babies could be infected. Some are delaying daycare. Others, like Kandace Hyland, a marketing director in Salt Lake County, don’t have that option.

Hyland was shocked when her daycare told her that it didn’t track the vaccine status of staff, even amid the outbreak. In March, she posted an calling for the state to require daycare staff to be vaccinated against the measles when the virus is spreading. Even if daycare staff file for vaccine exemptions, she said, parents could at least find out what portion of their babies’ caretakers pose a life-threatening risk.

Hyland sent her idea to the state health department. Nolen, the state epidemiologist, said she agreed with the concern, and was “talking with the division of licensing about the issue,” in an email shared with ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News. Hyland also wrote the Division of Licensing and Background Checks. In an email, its director, Shannon Thoman-Black, replied that the division does “not have the legislative authority to implement a mandate.”

“They always talk about parents’ choice,” Hyland said. “But I don’t feel like I have a really good ‘parents’ choice’ right now.”

Measles’ Comeback

The U.S. will almost certainly this year or next, but it could be regained if political leadership backed nationwide campaigns to boost confidence in vaccines, said Demetre Daskalakis, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s national immunization center and now the chief medical officer at the Callen-Lorde community health center in New York.

“Under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, that’s unlikely to happen,” he said. “We’re going back to a pre-vaccine era.”

HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard defended the secretary and his agency in an email, writing that the CDC has “surged resources” to contain measles outbreaks. “The CDC, HHS principles and the Secretary have been vocal that the MMR vaccine is the best way to protect yourself against measles,” she said.

Kennedy’s words and actions suggest otherwise. He’s said that the measles vaccine leads to “deaths every year,” which is . He continues a potential link between autism and vaccines, no matter how many there is none. And he oversaw abrupt changes to the recommended childhood vaccine schedule, a move called dangerous and not backed by science. A federal judge blocked those changes in March, but Trump recently issued an executive order to reexamine the schedule.

“It’s been confusing for the public,” said Dorothy Adams, executive director of the Salt Lake County Health Department.

In May, Kennedy met with Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, who has said little about the state’s ongoing outbreak. Kennedy praised Utah’s action on Make America Healthy Again priorities, such as banning fluoride in public drinking water and easing restrictions on raw milk sales, according to Salt Lake City’s . Cox declined to comment for this article.

Meanwhile, the U.S. public health system has been further weakened by the Trump administration’s cuts and delays to public health grants.

“If you’re in the thick of it and you don’t know if you will be reimbursed, you adjust your response,” said Angela Dunn, a doctor and former Utah state epidemiologist. “This outbreak is a perfect storm of disinformation, trauma from the covid pandemic, and the drop in funding.”

Measles isn’t the only preventable malady making a comeback. As children played nearby in a sun-speckled park in Salt Lake City, Morris talked about a baby in the intensive care unit who was bleeding uncontrollably after a fall. The baby’s parents had refused an injection of vitamin K that helps blood clot in newborns. As they fretted over their infant, Morris said, she felt awful for them and regretted not being able to overcome mistrust in basic, lifesaving interventions. She had the same swirl of emotions when an unvaccinated toddler in her care recently died of whooping cough.

“I was one of the only people in the room with the nurse when the child coded,” she said with tears in her eyes. “You think, ‘I wish this child was vaccinated,’ but it’s hard because I also see how much grief these parents are holding.”

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If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.”

Nearly every Tuesday for a decade, Steve Siple attended a bar trivia night with friends in Birmingham, Alabama. After moving to North Carolina, he developed a new ritual — on Saturdays to pick up trash along the city’s light rail.

These are more than fun outings to Siple. They help keep him alive.

Siple has battled suicidal thoughts in the past. He lost his father to suicide, and one of his sons has struggled with thoughts of hurting himself.

That’s made Siple vigilant about protecting himself and his family. In addition to seeing a counselor regularly and speaking openly about mental health, he prioritizes social connection.

“Loneliness was, over my lifetime, one of the greatest risk factors” for suicide, said Siple, a for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

To some, this concept may seem obvious. Yet in the overall approach to suicide prevention, it’s often overlooked. Treatment of a serious mental illness that can lead to suicide, such as major depressive disorder, often centers on medication and talk therapy with little or no consideration of factors such as social isolation or financial duress. Now, there’s a growing movement to address loneliness not just through personal choices but also through public policy.

The research is clear: Among the various complex issues that contribute to suicide, is a . It’s a for older adults, who have and for youths, for whom .

Humans are social animals. When we feel cut off from one another, our , our , and ultimately we’re (by suicide or ). An concluded that being socially disconnected is as harmful to one’s health as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

And it’s getting worse.

Mental health researchers and clinicians say a variety of factors are in America, including the , such as smartphones and ; increased ; the since the covid pandemic; and .

With suicide rates remaining stubbornly high — often ranking among the in America — some advocates and people who have lost loved ones to suicide say increasing pathways to social connection could be a new frontier.

In this ongoing series, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News is examining new approaches to suicide prevention that shift the focus from stopping harm in moments of crisis to efforts that give people reasons to live well before they make fateful choices.

“If we want to reduce suicide rates in our country, which is absolutely essential, then a key part of that has to be fostering social connection,” said who served as surgeon general under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. “We have more than enough data to support this as being an important area of focus.”

In 2023, Murthy released the first on loneliness as a public health issue, with more than 300 supporting citations. He’s also on the topic and is touring the country discussing the value of social connection.

“To help someone else feel less alone, to help them feel seen and understood and valued,” he told ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News, “that can be one of the most powerful interventions that we make.”

A Role for Elected Officials

Curing loneliness may seem like the responsibility of families and neighbors, people making one-to-one connections. But Murthy says elected officials have work to do, too.

They can use their bully pulpits to turn this into a mainstream issue, he said. They can create microgrants to support grassroots ideas from community entrepreneurs and invest in “social infrastructure,” he added.

That term refers to things in the community that support the development of social connection, from physical spaces, such as libraries and parks, to policies and programs, such as building public transportation and fostering volunteer groups.

“These all matter and impact whether people gather,” Murthy said.

However, investing in public institutions and infrastructure is a costly endeavor that can seem unreasonable when local officials are struggling to balance budgets without increasing tax burdens.

That’s where creativity can kick in.

A health system and a museum in Charlotte have teamed up to for people to attend art classes or live performances together. In Tennessee, the city of Chattanooga is funding community ideas to increase connection and time in nature, where people can speak with volunteer listeners. And across the country, have popped up as places where men can work on projects side by side and discuss their mental health.

Meal Deliveries and Valentines

Marcie O’Neal knew she wouldn’t have much money at her disposal. She was hired in 2024 to lead suicide prevention efforts in the rural of western Kentucky after local leaders saw a rise in suicides among the elderly. Her grant was about $280,000 — less than .

But she knew the nine-county area had other strengths, such as dedicated meal delivery programs and high school clubs.

Drivers who drop off prepared meals to homebound residents “can be the only person that an older adult sees in the week,” O’Neal said.

The state had already been training some of those drivers to recognize warning signs of suicide among older people and alert county agencies to follow up with them. O’Neal thought there could be another component.

She reached out to high school , which focus on fostering leadership skills and volunteerism, across the nine counties and asked them to write cards that could be distributed to older residents along with meals. The response was swift, O’Neal said.

About 1,200 cards were delivered last May. They repeated the gesture in February for Valentine’s Day and again this May.

O’Neal said one of the older residents told her, “I don’t remember the last time I got a Valentine’s card.”

The students also enjoyed feeling as if they made a difference, O’Neal said. She’s helping one school set up an ongoing pen pal program with a nearby retirement community.

Locals affectionately call O’Neal “the suicide lady” — a term she considers “a badge of honor.”

Suicide prevention “doesn’t have to be sweeping huge things,” she said. “It’s a little thing you can do that can kind of snowball into more things.”

‘The Secret Sauce’

Siple, who has prioritized social connection through the trivia nights and volunteer clean-ups, felt most alone when he transitioned from a job at a commercial bank to working at home.

He spent most of his day analyzing Excel sheets, drafting grant proposals, and compiling recommendations for clients. The work felt important, but it was isolating, Siple said.

“If my wife or kids were around during the evening, I was safe,” he said. Holding meetings at coffee shops helped, too.

But when it was just him at his desk, “that’s where I got the darkest lonely feelings,” he said, including thoughts of suicide.

Breaking out of that required seeking new connections.

Siple said church was a great anchor for him and his wife — not just on Sundays but throughout the week at Bible studies and potlucks. They also go to see a variety of live music, including bluegrass and alternative rock.

“Being with folks that are into the same type of music that we’re into for a concert feels like connection,” he said.

Research suggests sports can play a similar role in some instances. At least two studies have found are associated with . The authors posit it’s because people coming together to support their team or to enjoy the event creates a sense of belonging, which is protective.

That concept resonates with , who has worked on suicide prevention efforts at the state and and helps run Sources of Strength, an upstream prevention program. Fostering that sense of belonging has played a central role in each of those initiatives, she said.

“We can’t eliminate hard stuff in our lives,” said Brummett, who lost five friends to suicide, starting in middle school.

“Belonging is really the secret sauce,” she said, “for how we, as humans, can navigate really hard things.”

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Céline Gounder, ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø News’ editor-at-large for public health, discussed a recent study that suggests ultraprocessed foods are linked to increased dementia risk on CBS News 24/7’s The Daily Report on June 3. Gounder also discussed the Ebola outbreak in central Africa and the impact of U.S. health funding cuts on CBS News’ CBS Mornings on June 3.

On June 2, Gounder joined CBS News’ CBS Mornings to discuss a study that found women taking GLP-1 drugs had a lower rate of breast cancer diagnoses. She also discussed President Donald Trump’s new medical report and creatine supplements on CBS News 24/7’s Mornings and CBS News’ CBS Mornings, respectively, on June 1.

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