Science
Metro will offer free rides in L.A. through Sunday due to fires

L.A. Metro has suspended fare collection on its trains and buses through Sunday as wildfires continue to ravage parts of the county, officials said Saturday.
The agency said earlier this week that L.A. County Supervisor and Metro Board Chair Janice Hahn had authorized the agency to stop collecting fares across its system. The agency extended the free rides through the weekend to help residents travel, including to shelters.
Metro also created a map showing evacuation and resource centers near its bus and rail routes.
Officials said riders should allow for extra time because the wildfires and wind have impacted service on some bus and rail lines.
Here are the current service alerts:
A LINE: Bus shuttles replace trains in both directions between the Southwest Museum and Fillmore stations due to wind damage to overhead wires. This work will continue into Saturday. Allow extra time if riding to or from the San Gabriel Valley.
LINE 134: Canceled due to the fire in the Palisades area.
LINES 180 and 217: Buses detouring between Los Feliz Boulevard/San Fernando and Vermont/Prospect due to downed power lines. Buses using Sunset, Alvarado, Glendale, Rowena, Hyperion, Glendale and San Fernando.
LINES 660 and 662: No service north of Washington Boulevard in the Pasadena and Altadena areas due to wildfires.
LINE 296: Buses detour to 5 Freeway between Los Feliz Boulevard and Western Avenue.
LINE 602: Canceled due to the fire in the Palisades area.
LINE 690: Buses in both directions are using the 210 Freeway between Foothill/Arroyo and Paxton/McLay.
METRO MICRO: In Pasadena, Altadena, and Sierra Madre, service north of Woodbury Road, New York Drive and Sierra Madre Boulevard is suspended. Service has been restored in the following areas:
*Rose Bowl area
*Lincoln Boulevard south of Montana Street
*Montana Street and south between the 210 Freeway and Los Robles Avenue
*Elizabeth Street and south between Los Robles Avenue and Hill Avenue
*New York Drive and south between Hill Avenue and Altadena Drive
All service alerts can be found at https://alerts.metro.net/

Science
Bird flu infections in dairy cows are more widespread than we thought, according to a new CDC study

A new study published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that the H5N1 bird flu virus is probably circulating undetected in livestock in many parts of the country and may be infecting unaware veterinarians.
In the health agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a group of researchers from the CDC, the Ohio Department of Health and the American Assn. of Bovine Practitioners, reported the results of an analysis they conducted on 150 bovine, or cow, veterinarians from 46 states and Canada.
They found that three of them had antibodies for the H5N1 bird flu virus in their blood. However, none of the infected vets recalled having any symptoms — including conjunctivitis, or pink eye, the most commonly reported symptom in human cases.
The three vets also reported to investigators that they had not worked with cattle or poultry known to be infected with the virus. In one case, a vet reported having practiced only in Georgia (on dairy cows) and South Carolina (on poultry) — two states that have not reported H5N1 infections in dairy cows.
Seema Lakdawala, a microbiologist at Emory University in Atlanta — who was not involved in the research — said she was surprised that only 2% of the veterinarians surveyed tested positive for the antibodies, considering another CDC study showed that 17% of dairy workers sampled had been infected. But she said she was even more surprised that none of them had known they were infected or that they had worked with infected animals.
“These surprising results indicate that serum surveillance studies are important to inform risk of infections that are going undiagnosed,” she said. “Veterinarians are on the front line of the outbreak, and increased biosafety practices like respiratory and eye protection should reduce their exposure risk.”
Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University, described the study as a “good and bad news story.”
“On one hand, we see concerning evidence that there may be more H5N1 outbreaks on farms than are being reported,” she said. “On the other hand, I’m reassured that there isn’t evidence that infections among vets have been widespread. This means there’s more work that can and should be done to prevent the virus from spreading to more farms and sickening workers.”
The analysis was conducted in September 2024. At that time, there had been only four human cases reported, and the infection was believed to be restricted to dairy cattle in 14 states. Since then, 68 people have been infected — 40 working with infected dairy cows — and the virus is reported have infected herds in 16 states.
John Korslund, a retired U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist, said in an email that finding H5N1 antibodies in the blood of veterinarians was an interesting “but very imprecise way to measure state cattle incidence.” But it underscored “that humans ARE susceptible to subclinical infections and possible reassortment risks, which we already knew, I guess.”
Reassortment occurs when a person or animal is infected with more than one influenza virus, allowing the two to mingle and exchange “hardware,” potentially creating a new, more virulent strain.
More important, he said, the D1.1 version of the strain — which has been detected in Nevada dairy cattle and one person living in the state — is “changing the landscape. … [P]eople may be more more susceptible (or not) with a greater potential for severeness (or not).”
“I’m confident that we’ll find it in other states. Its behavior and transmissibility within and between cattle herds is still pretty much a black box,” he said.
Science
Top N.I.H. Official Abruptly Resigns as Trump Orders Deep Cuts

The No. 2 official at the National Institutes of Health abruptly resigned and retired from government service on Tuesday, in another sign that the Trump administration is reshaping the nation’s public health and biomedical research institutions.
The official, Dr. Lawrence A. Tabak, a dentist and researcher, was long considered a steadying force and had weathered past presidential transitions. In a letter that Dr. Tabak sent to colleagues on Tuesday, he did not give a reason for his decision. One person familiar with the decision said Dr. Tabak had been confronted with a reassignment that he viewed as unacceptable.
“It has been an enormous privilege to work with each of you (and your predecessors) to support and further the critical NIH mission,” Dr. Tabak wrote.
Dr. Tabak resigned at a turbulent time for the institutes, the nation’s premier biomedical research industry, composed of 27 separate institutes and centers that study and develop treatments for diseases like cancer and heart conditions as well as infectious diseases like AIDS and Covid. The N.I.H. spends roughly $48 billion a year on medical research, much of it in grants to medical centers, universities and hospitals across the country.
President Trump’s decision to slash billions of dollars in N.I.H. grant funding has sparked a bitter court battle. And the Senate on Wednesday voted to advance the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic and the president’s pick for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the N.I.H.
Mr. Kennedy has said he would cut 600 N.I.H. jobs.
The N.I.H. said it would soon have a statement about Dr. Tabak’s decision.
Dr. Tabak was not well-known to the public. But his decision to leave is surprising, and destabilizing for an agency that is on the political hot seat. He was viewed as someone who could work across party lines; he had survived the presidential turnovers of both parties and had indicated he expected to stay on after Mr. Trump was elected in November.
Ordinarily, Dr. Tabak would have ascended to the job of acting N.I.H. director during the transition from one administration to the next. But the Trump administration installed another researcher, Matthew Memoli of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as acting director. Dr. Memoli criticized Covid vaccine mandates, as did Mr. Kennedy.
As acting director of the N.I.H. last year, Dr. Tabak pushed back against Republicans’ assertions that a lab leak stemming from U.S. taxpayer-funded research might have caused the coronavirus pandemic. He told lawmakers that viruses being studied at a laboratory in Wuhan, China, bore no resemblance to the one that set off the world’s worst public health crisis in a century.
Ellen Barry contributed reporting.
Science
California’s Scary Product Warning Labels Might Be Working, Study Says

The warnings, on thousands of products sold in California, are stark.
“Use of the following products,” one label says, “will expose you to chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm.”
Now, new research shows the warnings may be working.
A study published Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science & Technology found that California’s right-to-know law, which requires companies to warn people about harmful chemicals in their products, has swayed many companies to stop using those chemicals altogether.
As it turns out, companies don’t want to sell a product that carries a big cancer warning label, said Dr. Megan Schwarzman, a physician and environmental-health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health and an author of the study.
Combine that with the threat of lawsuits and reputational costs, as well as companies just wanting to do the right thing for health, and “it becomes a great motivator for change,” she said.
California maintains a list of about 900 chemicals known to cause cancer and other health effects. Under the 1986 right-to-know law, also known as Prop 65, products that could expose people to harmful amounts of those chemicals must carry warning labels.
Critics had long mocked the measure, saying the warnings were so ubiquitous — affixed to cookware, faux leather jackets, even baked goods — that they had become largely meaningless in the eyes of shoppers. But the latest study found that companies, more than consumers, may be most influenced by the warnings.
To assess the law’s effect, researchers carried out interviews at 32 global manufacturers and retailers that sell clothing, personal-care, cleaning, and a range of home products. Almost 80 percent of interviewees said Prop 65 had prompted them to reformulate their products.
Companies can avoid the warning labels if they reduce the level of any Prop 65 chemicals below a “safe harbor” threshold.
A similar share of companies said they looked to Prop 65 to determine which chemicals to avoid. And 63 percent said the law had prompted them to also reformulate products they sold outside California.
The American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical manufacturers, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the study.
No other state has a law quite like Prop. 65, requiring warnings on such a wide range of products about cancer or reproductive harm. New York enacted a more limited law in 2020 that requires manufacturers to disclose certain chemicals in children’s products and that bans the use of certain chemicals by 2023. Other states have laws geared toward disclosure of ingredients on labels.
California, meanwhile, is pushing ahead. A 2018 change to Prop 65 has meant products are starting to carry even more specific labels. Some food and beverage cans, for example, may carry labels that warn that they “have linings containing bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical known to the State of California to cause harm to the female reproductive system.”
The latest research is part of a larger effort to analyze Prop 65’s effect on people’s exposure to toxic chemicals. In a study published last year, researchers at the Silent Spring Institute and UC Berkeley found that in the years after certain chemicals were listed under the law, levels of those chemicals in people’s bodies decreased both in California and nationwide.
That research came with a caveat, however. In some examples where levels of a listed chemical decreased, a close substitute to that chemical, potentially with similar harmful effects, increased. Prop 65 has no mechanism to check the safety of alternative chemicals.
It suggested that stronger policies were needed at both the federal and state levels to study and regulate the thousands of chemicals on the market, Dr. Schwarzman said. “This is so much bigger than the individual consumer and what we choose off-the-shelf,” she said.
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