Unews

Last summer, a group of officials from the Department of Energy gathered at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling 890-square-mile complex in the eastern desert of Idaho where the U.S. government built its first rudimentary nuclear power plant in 1951 and continues to test cutting-edge technology. On the agenda that day: the future of nuclear energy in the Trump era. The meeting was convened by 31-year-old lawyer Seth Cohen. Just five years out of law school, Cohen brought no significant experience in nuclear law or policy; he had just entered government through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team. As Cohen led the group through a technical conversation about licensing nuclear reactor designs, he repeatedly downplayed health and safety concerns. When staff brought up the topic of radiation exposure from nuclear test sites, Cohen broke in. “They are testing in Utah. … I don’t know, like 70 people live there,” he said. “But … there’s lots of babies,” one staffer ...

It’s difficult to put yourself in the place of Cherise Doyley, a pregnant mother of three who found herself facing a judge while in labor at the University of Florida Health hospital in downtown Jacksonville. She had arrived at the facility with a plan for her birth. She wanted to try for a vaginal delivery, but she understood from years of experience as a professional birthing doula that things don’t always go as planned. She arrived overnight at the hospital after her water broke. Doctors told her they were concerned about the risk of uterine rupture, a potentially deadly complication for her and her baby. She understood the risk to be less than 2% and repeatedly told doctors she wouldn’t consent to a cesarean without trying to have a vaginal delivery first. The doctors appeared to relent, leaving her to labor for several more hours.  Then a nursing supervisor wheeled a tablet up to her bed and informed her she was in court. The reason? Failing to agree to a C-section.  ...

Dr. Adam Ratner hovered over a gravely ill infant in a New York City intensive care unit on a grim day in 2022. The 3-month-old girl spiked a fever two days earlier and had become lethargic. Soon she was having seizures and struggling to breathe. She didn’t register Ratner’s towering frame or the bright hospital lights. Her eyes stared up and to the right, eerily frozen.  He ran his hand over the soft spot on her head, which should have been flat. Instead, it bulged, a sign that too much fluid was building up inside her skull.  The baby’s life was in danger, and Ratner needed to figure out why. He worried the culprit was bacterial meningitis, an infection of the membranes that protect the brain. What came back on her lab tests was something out of the history books. The infant’s meningitis was caused by invasive Haemophilus influenzae type b, or Hib, a type of bacteria that used to kill nearly 1,000 children a year in the U.S. A shot introduced in the late 1980s was so e...