The Los Angeles Unified School District released a litany of test results for the fire-damaged Palisades Charter High School ahead of the planned return of students next week, showing the district’s remediation efforts have removed much of the post-fire contamination.

However, some parents remain concerned with a perceived rush to repopulate the campus. And while experts commended the efforts as one of the most comprehensive post-fire school remediations in modern history, they warned the district failed to test for a key family of air contaminants that can increase cancer risk and cause illness.

“I think they jumped the gun,” said a parent of one Pali High sophomore, who asked not to be named because she feared backlash for her child. “I’m quite angry, and I’m very scared. My kid wants to go back. … I don’t want to give him too much information because he has a lot of anxiety around all of these changes.”

Nevertheless, she still plans to send her child back to school on Tuesday, because she doesn’t want to create yet another disruption to the student’s life. “These are kids that also lived through COVID,” she said.

The 2025 Palisades fire destroyed multiple buildings on Pali High’s campus and deposited soot and ash in others. Following the fire, the school operated virtually for several months and, in mid-April of 2025, moved into a former Sears department store in Santa Monica.

Meanwhile, on campus, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers cleared debris from the destroyed structures, and LAUSD hired certified environmental remediation and testing companies to restore the still-standing buildings to a safe condition.

LAUSD serves as the charter school’s landlord and took on post-fire remediation and testing for the school. The decision to move back to the campus was ultimately up to the charter school’s independent leadership.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power tested the drinking water for a slew of contaminants, and environmental consultants tested the soil, HVAC systems, indoor air and surfaces including floors, desks and lockers.

They tested for asbestos, toxic metals such as lead and potentially hazardous organic compounds often unleashed through combustion, called volatile organic compounds, or VOCs.

“The school is ready to occupy,” said Carlos Torres, director of LAUSD’s office of environmental health and safety. “This is really the most thorough testing that’s ever been done that I can recall — definitely after a fire.”

A handful of soil samples had metal concentrations slightly above typical post-fire cleanup standards, which are designed to protect at-risk individuals over many years of direct exposure to the soil — such as through yard work or playing sports. An analysis by the environmental consultants found the metals did not pose a health risk to students or staff.

On indoor surfaces, the consultants found two areas with lead and one with arsenic, spaces they recleaned and retested to make sure those metals were no longer present.

The testing for contamination in the air, however, has become a matter of debate.

Some experts cautioned that LAUSD’s consultants tested the air for only a handful of mostly non-hazardous VOCs that are typically used to detect smoke from a wildfire that primarily burned plants. While those tests found no contamination, the consultants did not test for a more comprehensive panel of VOCs, including many hazardous contaminants commonly found in the smoke of urban fires that consume homes, cars, paints, detergents and plastics.

The most notorious of the group is benzene, a known carcinogen.

At a Wednesday webinar for parents and students, LAUSD’s consultants defended the decision, arguing their goal was only to determine whether smoke lingered in the air after remediation, not to complete more open-ended testing of hazardous chemicals that may or may not have come from the fire.

Andrew Whelton, a Purdue University professor who researches environmental disasters, didn’t find the explanation sufficient.

“Benzene is known to be released from fire. It is known to be present in air. It is known to be released from ceilings and furniture and other things over time, after the fire is out,” Whelton said. “So, I do not understand why testing for benzene and some of the other fire-related chemicals was not done.”

For Whelton, it’s representative of a larger problem in the burn areas: With no decisive guidance on how to remediate indoor spaces after wildland-urban fires, different consultants are making significantly different decisions about what to test for.

LAUSD released the testing results and remediation reports in lengthy PDFs less than two weeks before students plan to return to campus, while the charter school’s leadership decided on a Jan. 27 return date before testing was completed.

At the webinar, school officials said two buildings near the outdoor pool have not yet been cleared through environmental testing and will remain closed. Four water fixtures are also awaiting final clearance from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and the school’s food services are still awaiting certification from the L.A. County Department of Public Health.

For some parents — even those who are eager to ditch the department store campus — it amounts to a flurried rush to repopulate Pali High’s campus that is straining their decisions about how to keep their kids safe.

Torres stressed that his team acted cautiously in the decision to authorize the school for occupancy, and that promising preliminary testing helped school administrators plan ahead. He also noted that the slow, cautious approach was a point of contention for other parents who hoped their students could return to the campus as quickly as possible.

Experts largely praised LAUSD’s efforts as thorough and comprehensive — with the exception of the VOC air testing.

Remediation personnel power washed the exterior of buildings, wiped down all surfaces and completed thorough vacuuming with filters to remove dangerous substances. Any soft objects such as carpet or clothing that could absorb and hold onto contamination were discarded. The school’s labyrinth of ducts and pipes making up the HVAC system was also thoroughly cleaned.

Crews tested throughout the process to confirm their remediation work was successful and isolated sections of buildings once the work was complete. They then completed another full round of testing to ensure isolated areas were not recontaminated by other work.

Environmental consultants even determined a few smaller buildings could not be effectively decontaminated and consequently had them demolished.

Torres said LAUSD plans to conduct periodic testing to monitor air in the school, and that the district is open to parents’ suggestions.

For Whelton, the good news is that the school could easily complete comprehensive VOC testing within a week, if it wanted to.

“They are very close at giving the school a clean bill of health,” he said. “Going back and conducting this thorough VOC testing … would be the last action that they would need to take to determine whether or not health risks remain for the students, faculty and visitors.”

One year ago this week, a case of measles was recorded in Gaines County, Texas.

It was the start of an outbreak that killed two children and sickened at least 760 people. Thousands more in the U.S. have contracted measles since.

In April, the Pan American Health Organization, an offshoot of the World Health Organization, will determine whether the same virus strain first recorded in west Texas on Jan. 20, 2025, has been transmitted without interruption in the 12 months since.

If it has, the U.S. will officially lose the measles elimination status that the organization conferred in 2000.

Meeting those requirements “took several decades of really hard work,” said Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease specialist and emeritus professor at UC Berkeley. “Losing that distinction is an embarrassment for the United States. It’s another nail in the coffin for the credibility of this country.”

In public health terms, elimination means that a disease has become rare enough, and immunity to it widespread enough, that local transmission dwindles quickly if a case or two emerges.

Scientists from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control are studying virus sequences from multiple sites around the U.S. to determine whether more recent measles cases are descended from the original outbreak or were introduced from other locations, a distinction that could affect whether the U.S. keeps its status.

Regardless of the international committee’s ultimate ruling, what is clear is that a highly contagious, vaccine-preventable disease kept largely in check for a quarter of a century is surging back.

There were 4,485 confirmed measles cases in the U.S. between Jan. 1, 2000, and Dec. 31, 2024, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In 2025 alone, there were 2,242 — the highest annual case count since the early 1990s.

“Measles is incredibly contagious, and it is the thing that comes first when you take your foot off the gas, in terms of trying to keep vaccination levels up,” said Dr. Adam Ratner, a New York-based pediatric infectious disease specialist and author of the book “Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children’s Health.”

“It didn’t have to turn out this way,” he said. “It doesn’t help us that there haven’t been clear messages from HHS.”

In March, after the first child death from measles in more than a decade in the U.S., Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. issued a statement that noted vaccines’ effectiveness in preventing measles’ spread, but stopped short of outright recommending that parents vaccinate their children.

A month later, he posted on X: “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine,” outraging many of his anti-vaccine supporters.

Yet as the year went on, Kennedy and the agencies he leads upended the nation’s vaccine delivery system, while publicly sharing misleading and inaccurate information about immunizations.

Kennedy dismissed the members of a key vaccine advisory committee to the CDC and replaced them all with handpicked appointees, many of whom have been openly critical of vaccines or have spread medical misinformation.

Late last year, the CDC altered its website on vaccines and autism to include inaccurate statements linking immunizations to the neurodevelopmental disorder. Earlier this month, the CDC abruptly slashed the number of diseases it recommends children be vaccinated against from 17 to 11.

While the CDC has not officially changed MMR vaccine recommendations, the agency’s conflicting actions and confusing statements have only further depressed vaccination rates, experts said.

“The messages that are coming out of this CDC are crazy. It’s hard for pediatricians. It’s hard for parents,” Ratner said. “Nothing has changed about how safe the MMR vaccines are … or how well they work. It is all the messaging. And I’m very concerned that that is speeding up, not slowing down.”

Vaccination rates in the U.S. were already dipping before Kennedy’s appointment to Health and Human Services. Only 10 U.S. states — including California — meet the 95% vaccination threshold required to prevent community transmission of measles.

Forty-five states reported confirmed measles cases last year, and at least nine states have logged cases in January alone.

“If you go to cdc.gov, you would expect to see a huge banner saying, ‘Measles outbreak, get your vaccine now,’” said Dr. Jeff Goad, a Chapman University School of Pharmacy professor and president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. “And it’s not there.”

The Pan American Health Organization will review data from the U.S. and Mexico on April 13 to determine whether those two countries will endure the same fate as Canada, which lost its measles elimination status in November.

“Whether or not we officially lose elimination status is an academic exercise at this point,” said Mathew Kiang, an assistant professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford University. “The reality is that without concentrated efforts to ramp up vaccination, we will continue to have these long, extended outbreaks across the U.S. We’re witnessing the results of a years-long effort to disassemble the vaccine infrastructure in the U.S. that has been accelerated by the current administration.”

The meat industry’s celebration of the Trump administration’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans should be a clear sign that these new guidelines aren’t for the people.

It’s true that “the United States is amid a health emergency,” as Secretaries Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Brooke Rollins state. However, in claiming to be an answer to the diet-related diseases plaguing our nation, their guidelines are an alarming dismissal of actual science. They not only flip the food pyramid on its head, encouraging us to consume more full-fat dairy products, but they even promote red meat. The truth hasn’t changed: Consuming more red meat and dairy leads to more chronic disease, not less.

Eating red meat — even unprocessed varieties — has been found by Oxford researchers to increase the risk of heart disease. And according to the World Health Organization, some studies show processed red meat to be a carcinogen, potentially leading to colorectal cancer.

Protein consumption “at every meal” is emphasized in the latest guidelines, and although protein intake is indeed a crucial part of any diet, experts widely believe that it’s been overemphasized in this country. Most Americans already consume far more protein than they need. Furthermore, plant foods such as edamame, lentils, peas, nuts, seeds and legumes offer a healthy source of protein that’s free from the cholesterol found only in animal products.

Whole-food plant proteins are also typically very low in saturated fats, which have long been linked to an increased risk of heart disease and high cholesterol. Although previous USDA Dietary Guidelines recommended limiting saturated fat to just 10% or less of one’s daily calories, Kennedy continues to promote its consumption. The new guidelines go so far as to label beef tallow a “healthy fat,” despite its risks. Full-fat cow’s milk, too, is high in saturated fat, and dairy has been tied to a higher risk of certain types of cancer, including breast and prostate cancer.

Meanwhile, plant-based diets have been associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and death, and those high in fiber have been shown to reduce cancer risk. The American Cancer Society actually links low consumption of fruits and vegetables to nearly one-third of mouth, throat, esophageal and laryngeal cancers.

The government’s guidelines should not ignore years of nutrition science to prop up the meat and dairy industry. Thankfully, other institutions provide more evidence-based and responsible recommendations. For example, the New American Plate from the American Institute for Cancer Research recommends that two-thirds or more of one’s plate be filled with vegetables, fruits, beans and whole grains, and that animal-based proteins take up one-third or less. The American Heart Assn. “encourages adults to get most of their protein from plants.” The World Health Organization suggests shifting away from saturated fats, which should be “less than 10% of total energy intake,” and notes that consuming at least five portions of fruits and vegetables each day lowers one’s risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke and cancer.

Meanwhile, according to the Food & Drug Administration, sales of antibiotics for use in farm animals increased by 16% in 2024 compared with the previous year. More and more of these drugs are being funneled into factory farms, where 99% of U.S. farmed animals are raised. When used in excess, these drugs — along with hormones used to promote animal growth — eventually end up in the meat consumed by the public, resulting in the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that kill about 35,000 Americans annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“For decades, federal incentives have promoted low-quality, highly processed foods and pharmaceutical intervention instead of prevention,” write Kennedy and Rollins. But make no mistake: These guidelines demonstrate that the federal government continues to promote unhealthy food, benefiting agribusiness and putting public health at risk.

Mentions of vegetarian and vegan diets are saved for a small section at the end that focuses primarily on “nutrient gaps” rather than suggesting the ways a healthy plant-based diet can meet one’s nutritional needs and even promote better health.

The new guidelines feature several positive recommendations, including “eat real food” (whole, unprocessed) and limiting one’s consumption of highly processed foods, sugar and alcohol. Instead of stoking fear over plant-based meat alternatives or repeating buzz phrases like “ultra-processed foods,” which should be limited in any diet, our government should be recommending a diet backed by science.

“Together, we can shift our food system away from chronic disease and toward nutrient density, nourishment, resilience, and long-term health,” write Kennedy and Rollins. Yes, we can — if the federal government shifts its funding and promotion away from unhealthy, animal-based products to whole, plant-based foods.

Gene Baur is president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary.