Health
For Some Measles Patients, Vitamin A Remedy Supported by RFK Jr. Leaves Them More Ill
Doctors in West Texas are seeing measles patients whose illnesses have been complicated by an alternative therapy endorsed by vaccine skeptics including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary.
Parents in Gaines County, Texas, the center of a raging measles outbreak, have increasingly turned to supplements and unproven treatments to protect their children, many of whom are unvaccinated, against the virus.
One of those supplements is cod liver oil containing vitamin A, which Mr. Kennedy has promoted as a near miraculous cure for measles. Physicians at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, Texas, say they’ve now treated a handful of unvaccinated children who were given so much vitamin A that they had signs of liver damage.
Some of them had received unsafe doses of cod liver oil and other vitamin A supplements for several weeks in an attempt to prevent a measles infection, said Dr. Summer Davies, who cares for acutely ill children at the hospital.
“I had a patient that was only sick a couple of days, four or five days, but had been taking it for like three weeks,” Dr. Davies said.
While doctors sometimes administer high doses of vitamin A in a hospital to manage severe measles, experts do not recommend taking it without physician supervision. Vitamin A is not an effective way to prevent measles; however, two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine are about 97 percent effective.
At high doses, vitamin A can cause liver damage; dry, peeling skin; hair loss; and, in rare instances, seizures and coma. So far, doctors at West Texas hospitals have said they’ve seen patients with yellowed skin and high levels of liver enzymes in their bloodwork, both signs of a damaged liver.
Many of those patients had been in the hospital for a severe measles infection; doctors discovered the liver damage only after routine lab work.
As of Tuesday, the outbreak, which began in January, had spread to more than 320 people in Texas. Forty patients have been hospitalized, and one child has died.
In neighboring New Mexico counties, the virus has sickened 43 and hospitalized two. Seven confirmed cases in Oklahoma have also been linked to the outbreak.
Local doctors and health officials have become increasingly concerned about the growing popularity of unproven remedies for preventing and treating measles, which they fear is causing people to delay critical medical treatment and to reject vaccination, the only proven way to prevent a measles infection.
In Gaines County, alternative medicine has always been popular. Many in the area’s large Mennonite community, where most cases have been clustered, avoid interacting with the medical system and adhere to a long tradition of natural remedies.
Health officials said the recent popularity of vitamin A use for measles could be traced back to a Fox News interview with Mr. Kennedy, in which he said he had heard of “almost miraculous and instantaneous recovery” with treatments like cod liver oil, which he said was “the safest application of vitamin A.”
In an opinion essay for The Washington Post on Tuesday afternoon, Kevin Griffis, who was until last week the communications director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote that he had resigned in part because of Mr. Kennedy’s handling of the outbreak.
“In my final weeks at the C.D.C., I watched as career infectious-disease experts were tasked with spending precious hours searching medical literature in vain for data to support Kennedy’s preferred treatments,” Mr. Griffis wrote.
In the weeks after the Fox News interview, drugstores in West Texas struggled to keep vitamin A and cod liver oil supplements on their shelves. “I did not hear anything about vitamin A until he said it on television,” said Katherine Wells, the director of public health in Lubbock.
One local doctor — whom Mr. Kennedy named in the Fox News interview as one of the physicians who had told him “what is working on the ground”— opened a makeshift clinic in Gaines County and began doling out various treatments, including vitamin A supplements, to treat active measles cases and to prevent infection.
Dr. Davies said she suspected that a majority of the children she had treated had taken vitamin A supplements at home.
Experts say that vitamin A can play an important role in the “supportive care” that doctors provide to patients with severe measles infections.
It works by replenishing the bodily stores depleted by the virus, which bolsters the immune system, said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
In the hospital, physicians give only two doses of the vitamin to children with measles, usually over the course of two days, and “very carefully calibrate” the amounts depending on age and weight, he said.
Dr. Schaffner emphasized that it is not a miracle treatment for the virus, and that there is no antiviral medication for measles. And there is no credible evidence that vitamin A helps prevent infection in children in the United States, where vitamin A deficiencies are exceedingly rare.
In fact, giving children repeated, high doses of the vitamin is dangerous. Unlike other vitamins, which are flushed out of the body through urine, excess vitamin A accumulates in fat tissue, making it more likely to reach dangerous levels over time.
“That kind of preventative use I think is especially concerning,” said Dr. Lara Johnson, another doctor at the Lubbock hospital.
“When we have kids taking it for weeks and weeks, then you do potentially have a cumulative impact of the toxicity,” she added.
Dr. Johnson added that local physicians were particularly concerned about parents’ relying on over-the-counter supplements — whose labels don’t always accurately reflect the amount of vitamin they contain — and accepting dosage recommendations from unverified sources.
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If you’re trying to quit smoking, try a brisk walk or bike ride to curb your craving for a cigarette.
Researchers found that just one workout can reduce the urge to light up. But the type of exercise you do and how you do it makes a big difference.
High-intensity, aerobic exercise is most effective at reducing people’s cigarette cravings, a review of 59 randomized controlled trials involving more than 9,000 adults found.
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“Single-bout exercise reduced acute cravings immediately and up to 30 minutes post-exercise, but not longer-term cravings,” the authors of the study, published in the Journal of Sport and Health Science, reported.
Aerobic exercise is the most effective form of exercise for reducing cravings for cigarettes, researchers found. (iStock)
The research team highlighted other key findings from their study of “exercise-based interventions for smoking cessation.”
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Exercise training made people between 15% and 21% more likely to abstain from smoking than those who didn’t exercise, the authors found.
Researchers found that exercise curbs people’s cigarette cravings for up to 30 minutes after they stop exercising. (iStock)
Regular exercise also caused smokers to cut back by an average of two cigarettes per day.
In addition to being a free and accessible method for reducing smoking, exercise is also effective at reducing anxiety and stress, which drive many people to smoke.
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The authors suggest that because exercise boosts feel-good hormones, such as dopamine, and reduces the stress hormone cortisol, smokers who work out feel less inclined to use nicotine as a brain reward.
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Exercise should be integrated into other smoking cessation programs to enhance quit success, the authors concluded.
Exercise releases similar feel-good brain chemicals that people get from cigarettes, researchers suggested. (iStock)
They also noted that none of the trials addressed vaping and recommended that future research target the use of electronic cigarettes.
The deadly hantavirus outbreak aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius has put the spotlight on a rare pathogen that typically attracts relatively little attention, even from scientists.
There are no targeted treatments for hantaviruses, which are typically carried by rodents, and no widely available vaccines. So when passengers began falling ill in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, doctors and public health experts were limited in what they could offer.
“It’s kind of a wake-up call,” said Dr. Vaithi Arumugaswami, an infectious disease researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Our tool kit is almost empty.”
That’s not for lack of trying. A handful of scientific teams around the world have been working — for decades, in some cases — to develop hantavirus treatments and vaccines. But it has not been easy to find funding or nurture commercial interest in medical interventions for a type of pathogen that does not infect humans often and does not spread easily between people.
“It’s not an airborne, highly contagious viral threat, so it hasn’t been as high a priority for groups trying to prevent pandemics,” said Jay Hooper, a virologist at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.
But there are promising vaccines and treatments in development. And some of them, experts said, could be moved through the pipeline rapidly if hantavirus interventions became a priority.
“I do think there are things that are sitting there on the bench that could be quickly developed,” said Dr. Ronald Nahass, the president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America. “But nothing is ready.”
Vaccine development
There are two main types of hantaviruses: Old World viruses, which circulate primarily in Asia and Europe, and New World viruses, which are found in the Americas. The cruise ship outbreak has been linked to a New World virus known as the Andes virus, which is endemic to South America and is the only hantavirus known to spread between people.
There are vaccines that target some of the Old World viruses in Asia, but their efficacy is modest, experts said. And there are no licensed vaccines for the New World viruses, which include the Sin Nombre virus endemic to rodents in the western United States.
But there are some in development. Dr. Hooper and his colleagues have developed a DNA vaccine for the Andes virus, which proved promising in a small phase 1 trial. Under certain dosing regimens, the researchers found, more than 80 percent of participants produced neutralizing antibodies. “It’s pretty amazing,” said Dr. Hooper, who is an inventor on multiple hantavirus vaccine patents owned by the U.S. government. “Getting these kinds of neutralizing antibodies in humans is impressive.”
There were drawbacks, including that the vaccine seemed to require at least three doses. But the vaccine is ready for further development “if there’s a need,” Dr. Hooper said. “We’ve done the science. It’s just other forces that are required to move vaccines forward — markets, government demand.”
Other teams have potential vaccines in earlier stages of development. For instance, Bryce Warner, a hantavirus researcher at the University of Saskatchewan, and his colleagues are exploring a variety of approaches, including a nasal vaccine that they hope might spark a more robust immune response in the airway.
But the research, which is being conducted in hamsters, is still in early stages, and hantavirus vaccine candidates can be challenging to move forward. Scientists lack good large-animal models for hantaviruses, Dr. Warner said, and human cases are rare enough to make trials tricky. “It’s very difficult to conduct a clinical trial when you only have a limited number of cases annually,” he said. “You don’t have the numbers of people to really show a robust effect.”
Drug hunting
Currently, the primary treatment for hantavirus infection is supportive care, which may include supplemental oxygen or heart-lung bypass machines. Doctors also sometimes prescribe an existing antiviral drug, called ribavirin, but there is not strong evidence that it is effective for New World viruses, scientists said.
The hunt for new drugs is underway, though. At U.C.L.A., Dr. Arumugaswami and his colleagues found that favipiravir, an antiviral approved to treat influenza in Japan, inhibited the Andes virus in human cells. They also identified several compounds that had broad antiviral activity, blocking hantaviruses as well as other types of viruses, in human organoids, miniature clusters of tissue that mimic the function of organs.
Other teams have been working to develop therapeutic antibody treatments, often working from blood samples collected from hantavirus survivors. “We were able to isolate the natural antibodies that people are making and basically winnow them down and find one that was really good,” said Kartik Chandran, a virologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. “We actually found several.”
When Dr. Chandran and his colleagues tested these antibodies in hamsters, one produced especially encouraging results: It seemed to work against both Old and New World hantaviruses and was effective even when given relatively late in the course of infection, Dr. Chandran said.
(Dr. Chandran is listed as an inventor on patents for hantavirus antibodies.)
Several other teams have also produced antibodies that were broadly effective in small animals, but that is where a number of potential products have stalled, experts said.
“We have a lead drug, and now what we need is someone to pay the money, which would be something like $40 million, to go the next step,” said Dr. James Crowe, director of the Vanderbilt Center for Antibody Therapeutics. “We have neither government nor foundation nor company support to do that. So we’re just waiting to find a partner.”
(Vanderbilt University has applied for patents related to these antibodies; Dr. Crowe is listed as the inventor.)
Experts said that they hoped the current outbreak might help bring attention to a family of often-overlooked viruses.
“Certainly judging by just my inbox and text messages, there’s a renewed interest in these agents, and renewed interest in maybe at least revisiting where they are in the priority list,” Dr. Chandran said.
Whether that interest can be sustained after the virus fades from the headlines remains to be seen, experts acknowledged.
“Raising awareness never hurts,” Dr. Warner said. “We’ll see whether or not it leads to anything tangible, at least in terms of funding and resources for advancing some of these things that are lacking for hantavirus.”
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Gym membership in the U.S. hit a record high in 2025, according to the Health & Fitness Association, giving consumers more workout options — and more choices to sort through when picking the right fitness space.
Amid today’s wellness renaissance, many gyms and fitness clubs can cost hundreds of dollars per month, depending on the level of access and amenities offered.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Kenny Santucci — New York City fitness trainer, gym owner and host of the “Strong New York” podcast — revealed the attributes of a great gym.
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“A lot of people traditionally look at gyms [as if] they have to have all the bells and whistles,” he said. “Spa, bathrooms, all these things. For me, a gym is a gym. I go there for the equipment, I go for the culture, I go for the look and feel of the place.”
He added, “You can have an incredible gym [that’s] a garage gym, and you can have an incredible gym [that] somebody could have built for $10 million.”
Amid today’s wellness renaissance, many gyms and fitness clubs can cost hundreds of dollars per month, depending on the level of access and amenities offered. A New York City fitness trainer (not pictured) has a different view of what makes the best gyms.
Santucci, who visits new gyms across the country and posts his experiences on social media, said he looks for a balance between aesthetics and equipment quality, as well as “great people.”
“I think you could go and get in a sweat or a workout anywhere — but if the people are great, that’s what creates that great culture,” he said.
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“If you ask the average person who goes to most big-box gyms, the things they tell you they love about the gym are, ‘Oh, I love the showers. They have really nice towels.’ It’s nothing that actually pertains to the gym, and I believe that people should go to the gym to progress and get better,” he added.
With these goals in mind, Santucci revealed some of his top-rated gyms in the U.S.
Life Time Fitness
Life Time is a chain of luxury health clubs in the U.S., offering amenities like indoor courts, swimming pools, saunas and group fitness classes.
Santucci applauded the gym’s founder and CEO, Bahram Akradi, for being a “very hands-on owner and operator,” overseeing hundreds of gyms across the country.
The facade of an upscale Lifetime gym is shown in Walnut Creek, California, on April 8, 2025. (Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
“[Bahran’s] mentality and belief system around the fitness space, I absolutely love,” he said.
“I give a lot of credit to the guys who are owners and operators,” Santucci added. “They’re in the space, they’re making sure things are going really well. I think if you’re going to be in the gym business, you should be one of those people.”
Anatomy Gyms (Florida)
Santucci also shouted out Marc Megna, co-founder and co-CEO of Florida-based Anatomy Fitness for building a must-visit space.
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“It’s an incredible culture there, and I think that’s what they really push at that gym,” he said.
“The way the gym’s set up, the cleanliness of it, the aesthetics – you walk in that place, and you want to train … and those are things you can’t just buy … You have to live it, love it and be involved in the day-to-day operations.”
Powerhouse (New York/New Jersey)
In a newer recommendation, Santucci said he’s enjoyed stopping into Powerhouse Gym in New York City.
The New York- and New Jersey-based gym focuses on weight training and bodybuilding, including a powerlifting room and boxing rig at its locations.
“I just started going there, once or twice a week,” he said. “I really love the people and the culture.”
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The Training Lab (NYC)
For more of a group fitness and Hyrox training experience, Santucci recommends The Training Lab in New York City. (Hyrox is a global fitness racing brand and training system with affiliated gyms and training clubs.)
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“The guys over at Training Lab are incredible,” he told Fox News Digital. “Another owner-operator who’s involved in the business, who partakes in everything. I think they’re another great gym.”
“If you’re looking for group training, Training Lab’s a great space.”
Participants compete in the burpee broad jumps event during the Hyrox fitness race at the Bangkok International Trade and Exhibition Centre in Bangkok on March 21, 2026. (Amaury Paul/AFP)
The price of wellness
While some premier gym memberships can cost upward of $300 a month, Santucci said it isn’t necessary to spend a lot to get results, although it may result in more of an “experience.”
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“We need to restructure the way we think about health and wellness,” he said. “People aren’t going out as much anymore. They’re not spending as much on alcohol.
“It’s all what you prioritize. I prioritize fitness,” he went on. “I belong to multiple gyms. I have a membership to TMPL Gym here in [New York City]. I have a membership to Renzo Gracie’s. That’s what I like to do with my money.”
While some premier gym memberships can cost upward of $300 a month, Santucci emphasized that it isn’t necessary to spend a lot to get results. (iStock)
Santucci said what he’s paying for goes beyond the equipment — pointing to the staff, community and overall atmosphere as part of the value.
“If you want that elevated experience, you’re going to pay for that just like you would at a hotel or a restaurant or anything else,” he said.
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The expert suggested that wellness has recently become a “third form of hygiene.”
“It’s like you take a shower, you brush your teeth and you go to the gym,” he said. “I think those are three non-negotiables for almost everybody on a daily basis when it comes to your hygiene.”
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