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The Food and Drug Administration Monday unveiled the details of a new policy designed to make it easier and quicker for patients with very rare diseases to get cutting-edge treatments.

The new guidance would enable the agency to approve new treatments for rare diseases based on evidence for a "plausible mechanism" for how the treatment would work. The policy aims to speed the use of state-of-the-art technologies like gene-editing to create treatments tailored to individual patients suffering from diseases that are so rare that it would be difficult if not impossible to conduct a traditional study first.

"For decades families heard the same thing: There are not enough patients. The approval will take too long. You just have to wait for the science to catch up with your child, " Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at a briefing announcing the proposed new policy. "That ends today. Individualized medicine is no longer theoretical."

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As marijuana use among teens has grown in the past decade, researchers have been trying to better understand the health risks of the drug. Now, a new longitudinal study finds that cannabis use among adolescents increases risks of being diagnosed with bipolar and psychotic disorders, as well as anxiety and depression, years later.

"This is very, very, very worrying," says psychiatrist Dr. Ryan Sultan at Columbia University, a cannabis researcher who wasn't involved in the new study published in the latest JAMA Health Forum.

Researchers analyzed health data on 460,000 teenagers in the Kaiser Permanente Health System in Northern California. The teens were followed until they were 25 years old. The data included annual screenings for substance use and any mental health diagnoses from the health records. Researchers excluded the adolescents who had symptoms of mental illnesses before using cannabis.

"We looked at kids using cannabis before they had any evidence of these psychiatric conditions and then followed them to understand if they were more likely or less likely to develop them," says Dr. Lynn Silver, a pediatrician and researcher at the Public Health Institute, and an author of the new study.

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NewYork-Presbyterian nurses have ratified a new three-year contract, ending the largest and longest walkout by nurses in New York City history, the nurses’ union announced on Saturday evening.

The agreement was backed by 93% of the nurses voting, according to the New York State Nurses Association.

The 4,200 nurses in the NewYork-Presbyterian system will begin returning to work next week, the union said.

The NewYork-Presbyterian nurses were the last holdouts in the 41-day strike, which began on Jan. 12 and saw nearly 15,000 nurses at the hospital, along with Mount Sinai Hospital, Mount Sinai Morningside and West and Montefiore Medical Center walk off the job and form picket lines on snow-covered sidewalks across the city. Their prior agreements ended Dec. 31.

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NYU Langone Health, one of New York City’s major hospital networks, announced this week that it will shut down its gender‑affirming care program for minors, as the Trump administration escalates threats to strip federal funding from providers that treat trans youth.

In a statement to the Guardian, spokesperson Steve Ritea said that “given the recent departure of our medical director, coupled with the current regulatory environment, we made the difficult decision to discontinue our Transgender Youth Health Program.” He added that the hospital’s pediatric mental health services will continue.

The move comes after months of sustained pressure from the administration, including an executive order signed shortly after Trump returned to office declaring that the federal government will not “fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so‑called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another”.

NYU Langone reportedly began cancelling appointments for minors soon after the order was issued. New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, directed the hospital to resume care, warning that the network risked violating state anti‑discrimination laws. A federal judge later issued a temporary restraining order blocking the administration’s directive from taking effect.

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The Trump administration cannot proceed with plans to rescind $602 million in public health grants from four Democratic-led states, a federal judge in Illinois ruled Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Manish S. Shah determined the four states — Colorado, Illinois, California and Minnesota — were likely to succeed in their claim that the government’s desired termination of the grants was based on “arbitrary, capricious, or unconstitutional rationales.”

Shah, an appointee of former President Obama, blocked the administration from taking any action for 14 days while litigation is ongoing.

The states’ attorneys general sued several Trump officials on Wednesday, about a week after the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced it had ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to claw back millions in funding from blue states.

Those cuts were targeted at “states fraught with waste and mismanagement,” according to an OMB spokesperson.

The states framed the administration’s directive as “part of their ongoing campaign to punish Plaintiff States using the tool of federal funding for partisan political purposes,” arguing that it would harm “essential public health infrastructure” as well as the testing and treatment of deadly diseases.

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The U.S. government has given an ultimatum to the international group that helps provide vaccines to children in the world's poorest countries.

In a statement sent to NPR, The Department of Health and Human Services said that Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance must remove the ingredient thimerosal from its vaccines — or else the U.S. will "withhold future new funding." The news was first reported by Reuters on Wednesday.

At the heart of the U.S. demand is an unsubstantiated theory that the mercury in thimerosal could be linked to autism. Thimerosal is a chemical compound that is added to vaccines as a preservative.

This is the latest development in the changing relationship between Gavi — which says it has provided vaccines for 1.1 billion children in lower-resource countries and prevented 18 million deaths — and the United States, once a major funder of the vaccine group.

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