Health
N.I.H. Bans New Funding From U.S. Scientists to Partners Abroad
The National Institutes of Health will no longer allow American scientists to direct its funding to research partners overseas, casting doubt on the future of studies on subjects including malaria and childhood cancer.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the new director of the N.I.H., announced the policy on Thursday, the same day Dr. Matthew J. Memoli, the principal deputy director, blasted these so-called subawards in an email obtained by The New York Times.
“If you can’t clearly justify why you are doing something overseas, as in it can’t possibly be done anywhere else and it benefits the American people,” Dr. Memoli wrote, “then the project should be closed down.”
The new restrictions, which will apply to domestic subawards as well in the future, come amid deep reductions in N.I.H. funding and the freezing of federal grants at many top universities, along with executive orders seeking to reshape the nation’s scientific agenda.
On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order restricting a type of experimentation that can make pathogens more dangerous to humans, and ending support for the so-called gain-of-function research in countries like China.
Researchers funded by N.I.H. grants have historically used subawards to facilitate international collaborations, which are essential for studying conditions like childhood cancer or illnesses like malaria and tuberculosis that are not prevalent in the United States.
The subawards are legal and financial agreements made between the grant recipients and their overseas partners. The practice is used throughout the federal government and is not unique to the N.I.H.
But it has come under fire in recent years because of lax reporting and tracking of funds. After a critical report by the Government Accountability Office in 2023, the N.I.H. put stricter monitoring requirements in place.
Advocates for scientific and medical research said that as science has become more complex, collaborative initiatives that draw participants and scientists from around the world have become more critical.
“Competitive science requires a team approach,” said Dr. E. Anders Kolb, chief executive of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. “There’s no one lab or institution or investigator that has all of the tools necessary to solve the very complex questions that we’re asking.”
Many of these studies require a large number of subjects. For example, as scientists are able to define types of childhood cancers more precisely, Dr. Kolb said, “you get into increasingly smaller and smaller subsets of disease.”
“So if you want to run a clinical trial of a new therapy that may benefit those children, it could take decades to complete a trial if you only enroll children in the U.S.,” he added. “When we collaborate with our international partners, we can finish these trials much more quickly and get the therapies to children as soon as possible.”
In announcing the new directive, Dr. Bhattacharya cited recent Government Accountability Office reports that have been critical of funding given to international universities and laboratories, as well as businesses.
The issues highlighted by the G.A.O. reports “can lead to a breakdown in trust and potentially the security of the U.S. biomedical research enterprise,” Dr. Bhattacharya added.
N.I.H. spending on these international groups is difficult to track, one of the faults noted by the G.A.O. The journal Nature, which first reported the new policy, estimated the total at approximately $500 million a year.
Dr. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has N.I.H. funding to study H.I.V. prevention and treatment in Kenya and South Africa, work that will be affected by the new policy.
Researchers like her must provide detailed information about international subawards when they apply for their grants, she said, including justifications for using a foreign entity and for each aspect of the budget.
International partners must now provide access to their lab notebooks, data and other documentation at least once a year, Dr. Gandhi noted. All of the expenditures are tracked on a system called the Foreign Award and Component Tracking System, or FACTS, she said.
“It’s very rigorous, as it should be when you’re using taxpayer dollars,” Dr. Gandhi said.
“Every year when you put in your progress report, you account for every penny that was spent at the foreign site — where it went, how much to lab tests, how much was paid investigators, every aspect.”
It wasn’t immediately clear how the new policy would be implemented. The N.I.H. did not respond to requests for additional information.
The N.I.H. will not retroactively halt foreign subawards already in place “at this time” and will continue to make awards directly to international groups, the agency’s statement said.
But the new policy will forbid new competing awards and noncompeting awards to be reissued if they propose subawards to foreign institutions.
“If a project is no longer viable without the foreign subawards, N.I.H. will work with the recipient to negotiate a bilateral termination of the project,” the statement said.
The new policy appeared to be somewhat less draconian than the summation put forth by Dr. Memoli in his internal email, which threatened immediate action to shut down or pause international sites.
“Subawards to foreign sites can’t continue,” he wrote. “This has been horribly mismanaged for years and it has been completely irresponsible. We must take immediate action. If a study has a foreign site we need to start closing it down or finding a different way to fund it that can be tracked properly.”
G.A.O. reports that had criticized various federal departments for lax reporting had called for improving oversight. But the office did not recommend terminating such funding altogether.
In 2023, a G.A.O. report reviewed $2 million in direct awards and subawards, most of it from the N.I.H., given to three Chinese research institutions, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology, between 2014 and 2021.
The virology institute received subawards from the University of California, Irvine, and from the nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance. The alliance’s work with Chinese scientists led former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to suspend its funding last year. The Trump administration recently changed the government portal for Covid information with a website suggesting that the new virus originated in a lab in Wuhan.
The G.A.O. report said that N.I.H. oversight didn’t always ensure that the foreign institutions complied with terms and conditions, including biosafety requirements.
One reason expenditures were hard to track was because of a federal government policy that required reporting subawards only of $30,000 or more, another G.A.O. report said.
That report examined some $48 million in N.I.H. and State Department funding that went to Chinese businesses and research institutions between 2017 and 2021, including one project to study diseases that are transmitted by insects, like malaria.
It found that “the full extent of these subawards is unknown,” and that data was incomplete and sometimes inaccurate, because so many expenditures were exempt from reporting.
Apoorva Mandavilli contributed reporting.
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Eight energy drinks per day may lead to serious health consequences, recent research suggests.
A relatively healthy man in his 50s suffered a stroke from the overconsumption of unnamed energy beverages, according to a scientific paper published in the journal BMJ Case Reports by doctors at Nottingham University Hospitals in the U.K.
The unnamed man was described as “normally fit and well,” but was experiencing left-side weakness, numbness and ataxia, also known as poor coordination or unsteady walking.
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When the man sought medical attention, it was confirmed via MRI that he had suffered an ischemic thalamic stroke, the report stated.
The patient’s blood pressure was high upon admission to the hospital, was lowered during treatment and then rose again after discharge, even though he was taking five medications.
The 50-year-old man (not pictured) admitted to drinking eight energy drinks per day. (iStock)
The man revealed that he consumed eight cans of energy drink per day, each containing 160 mg of caffeine. His caffeine consumption had not been recorded upon admission to the hospital.
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Once the man stopped drinking caffeine, his blood pressure normalized, and he was taken off antihypertensive medications.
High caffeine content can raise blood pressure “substantially,” a doctor confirmed. (iStock)
Based on this case, the authors raised the potential risks associated with energy drinks, especially regarding stroke and cardiovascular disease.
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They also highlighted the importance of “targeted questioning in clinical practice and greater public awareness.”
The authors say this case draws attention to the potential dangers of over-consuming energy drinks. (iStock)
Fox News senior medical analyst Dr. Marc Siegel reacted to the case study in an interview with Fox News Digital.
“This case report illustrates the high risk associated with a large volume of energy drink consumption, especially because of the high caffeine content, which can raise your blood pressure substantially,” said Siegel, who was not involved in the study.
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“In this case, the large amount of caffeine appears to have led directly to very high blood pressure and a thalamic stroke, which is likely a result of that soaring blood pressure.”
Fox News Digital reached out to the case study authors and various energy drink brands for comment.
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Oprah Winfrey is shining a light on family estrangement, which she calls “one of the fastest-growing cultural shifts of our time” — but one expert says the media mogul helped fuel that very culture.
“A Cornell University study now shows that almost one-third of Americans are actively estranged from a family member,” Winfrey said on a recent episode of “The Oprah Podcast,” referring to adult children going “no-contact” with parents, siblings or entire family systems.
Winfrey said the trend is a “silent epidemic” that can be especially relevant during the holidays.
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But family and relationship coach Tania Khazaal, who focuses on fighting “cutoff culture,” took to social media to criticize Winfrey for acting as if the estrangement crisis appeared “out of thin air.”
“Now Oprah is shocked by the aftermath of estrangement, after being one of the biggest voices pushing it for decades,” Canada-based Khazaal said in an Instagram video, which drew more than 27,000 likes and 3,000 comments.
Oprah Winfrey recently discussed what she called a “silent epidemic” of family estrangement on her podcast. (Theo Wargo/Getty Images)
Khazaal claimed that Winfrey’s messaging started in the 1990s and has contributed to a cultural shift where walking away became the first resort, not the last.
According to the relationship coach, millennials, some of whom grew up watching Oprah, are the leading demographic cutting off family members — and even if it wasn’t intentional, “the effect has absolutely been harmful,” Khazaal told Fox News Digital.
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The coach, who has her own history with estrangement, questioned why Winfrey is now treating the issue as a surprising crisis.
“Now she hosts a discussion with estranged parents and estranged kids, speaking on estrangement like it’s some hidden, sudden, heartbreaking epidemic that she had no hand in,” she said in her video.
Nearly one-third of Americans are estranged from a family member, research shows. (iStock)
Khazaal said she believes discussions about estrangement are necessary, but insists that people shouldn’t “rewrite history.”
“Estrangement isn’t entertainment or a trending conversation piece,” she added. “It’s real families, real grief, parents dying without hearing their child’s voice.”
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Winfrey reportedly responded in the comments, writing, “Happy to have a conversation about it — but not on a reel. Will have my producer contact you if you’re interested.” But the comment was later deleted due to the backlash it received, Khazaal told Fox News Digital.
“I would still be open to that discussion,” Khazaal said. “The first thing I’d want her to understand is simple: Setting aside cases of abuse or danger, the family unit is the most sacred structure we have.”
Experts emphasize that estrangement should be a last resort. (iStock)
“When children lose their sense of belonging at home, they search for it in the outside world,” she added. “That’s contributing to the emotional fragility we’re seeing today.”
Her critique ignited a debate online, with some social media users saying Khazaal is voicing a long-overdue concern.
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“The first time I heard, ‘You can love them from a distance’ was from Oprah … in the ’90s,” one woman said.
“My son estranged himself from us for five years,” one mother commented. “The pain, hurt and damage never goes away.”
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Others, however, argued that Winfrey’s podcast episode was empathetic and that estrangement shouldn’t be oversimplified.
Mental health experts say the conversation around estrangement is more complex than any single celebrity influence, and reflects broader cultural shifts.
Experts say today’s focus on boundaries and emotional well-being has reshaped family expectations. (iStock)
In the episode with Winfrey, Joshua Coleman, a California-based psychologist, said, “The old days of ‘honor thy mother and thy father,’ ‘respect thy elders’ and ‘family is forever’ has given way to much more of an emphasis on personal happiness, personal growth, my identity, my political beliefs, my mental health.”
Coleman noted that therapists sometimes become “detachment brokers” by unintentionally green-lighting estrangement.
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Jillian Amodio, a licensed master’s social worker at the Maryland-based Waypoint Wellness Center, told Fox News Digital that while public figures like Winfrey help normalize these conversations, estrangement might just be a more openly discussed topic now.
“Estrangement used to be handled privately and quietly,” she said.
Winfrey’s take on family estrangement is prompting a broader discussion amid the holiday season. (iStock)
But even strained relationships can be fixed with the right support, experts say.
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Susan Foosness, a North Carolina-based clinical director of patient programs at Rula Health, said families can strengthen their relationships by working with a mental health professional to improve communication, learn healthier conflict-resolution skills, and build trust and empathy through quality time together.
“No family is perfect,” Foosness told Fox News Digital.
Khazaal agreed, saying, “Parents need to learn how to listen without slipping into justification, and children need help speaking about their pain without defaulting to blame or avoidance.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Winfrey for comment.
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