Health

(AUSTIN, Texas) — A middle school teacher in Texas is making sure no student has to miss class time due to or feels ashamed of their menstrual cycle.

Kylie DeFrance, an English as an additional language (EAL) teacher at a charter school in Austin, keeps “pad bags” filled with feminine hygiene products at her desk in her classroom so that any student can take them at any time.

It’s a practice she said she began in her first year of teaching eight years ago when she saw female students, or, as she calls them, scholars, missing instruction time due to their periods.

“I’ve had scholars that were missing school constantly or were disappearing in the bathroom for 30-plus minutes,” DeFrance told Good Morning America. “Or I’ve had scholars that say, ‘I have to go to the bathroom,’ or ‘to the office,’ and they’re gone for half the day.”

When DeFrance started providing free pads and tampons and heating pads to her students, she said she saw they were able to stay in class and focus on learning.

“It is such a huge difference to see how much instructional time that they are not missing that they were before,” she said. “I had one scholar who would literally disappear into the bathroom for 30 minutes, five days a week, once a month, who is now not disappearing in the bathroom at all, and her grade went from a ‘D’ to an ‘A.’ She’s an excellent scholar.”

DeFrance continued, “That just goes to show that having your period should not conflict or cause a difficulty with your learning if you’re provided with the things that you need to be provided with.”

When DeFrance started a new teaching job last August at Austin Achieve, a public charter school, she said she purchased feminine hygiene products at her own expense to store in her classroom.

As word spread at the school that DeFrance had easy-to-access period supplies in her classroom, she said the demand grew and she was soon spending over $100 per month on her own on supplies.

DeFrance said she quickly realized that for many of her students, her classroom was their only access point for supplies. Over 90% of students at Austin Achieve, a year-round school, qualify for free or reduced lunch, according to the school’s website.

“A lot of the scholars go home and they’re the parents for their siblings because their parents are at work,” said DeFrance. “Or maybe their parents can’t take them to the store because they’re having to choose between food and this.”

“I’m not ever going to say no and turn a scholar away,” she said. “So I started keeping multiple pad bags and started asking scholars, ‘Do you need to take this home?’”

Period poverty, when people cannot afford even the most basic of period supplies like pads and tampons, is an issue that affects women around the world, including the United States. A lack of access to menstrual products and education affects 1 in 10 college students in the U.S., according to a study released last year.

Hoping to be able to provide more supplies to more students at her middle school, DeFrance added feminine hygiene products to her Amazon wish list, which she said typically consists of books she needs for her classrooms.

In addition to sharing the link on her Instagram page, DeFrance also posted her wish list on Nextdoor, a social networking service for neighborhoods.

Within hours, according to DeFrance, Amazon boxes filled with period supplies began showing up at her doorstep, all donated by strangers through her wish list.

“It blew my mind,” she said of the response to her post. “I had never met any of these people. I don’t know any of these people, but I had hundreds of boxes at my door.”

The boxes have continued to pour in, according to DeFrance. She said that since February, people have donated over 6,000 pads and 3,000 tampons, in addition to other supplies, like disposable heating pads.

DeFrance has also been able to upgrade her “pad bags” from plastic sandwich bags to reusable, zipper bags thanks to strangers’ donations. This week, she also received donations of two portable carts that she said she plans to turn into “menstruation stations” in her classroom.

She said she organizes the “pad bags” based on students’ preferences, adding that students will often return the bags with notes on what types of supplies they need.

DeFrance said that because her school has students in fifth through eighth grades, she is often meeting students as they are starting their menstrual cycles. She focuses on keeping supplies in her classroom and easily accessible in hopes of “normalizing” the conversation around periods.

“If a scholar can say, ‘I need a pencil,’ and I can give them a pencil and it’s not a problem, why can’t it be, ‘I need a pad.’ Why is that any different?” DeFrance said. “I would not send a scholar to an office for a pencil, so why do I need to send a scholar to the office for a pad.”

Advocates for menstrual equity say the taboo around menstruation and the lack of access to menstrual products hurts women economically because it costs them money for products and may keep them from jobs and school. Poor menstrual hygiene poses health risks for women, including reproductive issues and urinary tract infections.

On average, a woman will spend around seven years in their lifetime on their period, according to UNICEF.

Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law requiring that public schools and colleges provide free menstrual products in classrooms.

DeFrance said that in her case, due to the surplus of donations, she has plans to put free period supplies in her school’s bathrooms and has already provided period products to teachers at nearby schools to distribute for free. She said she is also meeting this week with the leaders of Austin Achieve’s high school to discuss making supplies more accessible to students there.

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(NEW YORK) — Although officials have been warning for weeks of an impending coronavirus resurgence across the country, health experts say it is impossible to know exactly how widespread the nation’s latest resurgence may actually be, given the declining availability of COVID-19 data.

“An effective public health response depends on high quality, real time data,” said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and an ABC News contributor. “Underreporting, driven by changes in testing behavior, lack of public interest and severely underfunded local public health departments, create a perfect storm of misleading case counts and hospitalizations.”

Since last summer, dozens of states, along with federal agencies, have opted to scale back on regular COVID-19 data reporting. A dwindling number of states still offer daily COVID-19 data reports, with most now moving to an alternate-day schedule or even to a weekly schedule.

“With changing case definitions for hospitalizations, decreased testing, and increased use of at-home rapid tests, data on COVID-19 in the U.S. has become increasingly hard to interpret,” Sam Scarpino, the vice president of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute, told ABC News.

The significant decrease in data reporting and the nationwide decline in public testing have left health experts concerned that officials could be missing viral surges and in the dark about true positivity rates in the country, given the lack of information.

“I think that we’re dramatically undercounting cases. We’re probably only picking up one in seven or one in eight infections. So when we say there’s 30,000 infections a day, it’s probably closer to a quarter of a million infections a day,” Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said during an appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday. “They’re concentrated in the Northeast right now. And that’s because a lot of people are testing at home, they’re not presenting for definitive PCR tests, so they’re not getting counted.”

Health experts say official counts, which show small upticks, may actually be significantly higher than counted, as millions of Americans, who are taking at-home tests, rarely report their results to local health agencies

In consequence, testing levels are now at their lowest point since June 2020, with official test numbers dropping by more than 80% since the beginning of the year, with just half a million tests reported daily, compared to 2.5 million tests reported at the nation’s viral peak in January.

Dozens of states have also moved to shutter public testing sites, as at-home COVID-19 tests have become more accessible.

“These are uncharted waters for us with this virus,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told Bloomberg in an interview last week, reiterating that it is impossible to predict how COVID-19 will play out in the months to come.

“We are probably underestimating the number of infections that we’re having right now, because many of the infections are either without symptoms or minimally symptomatic, and you’ll miss that if people do it at home and it’s not reported to a central bank,” Fauci said.

In an effort to monitor the state of the current resurgence, scientists have been closely monitoring other metrics, including wastewater.

In the last 15 days, nearly 60% of wastewater sites monitored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported an increase in the presence of COVID-19 in their samples.

Hospitalization data, once the gold standard, now becoming less straightforward

For many officials, monitoring virus-related COVID-19 hospitalizations has been key to assessing the state of the pandemic. However, in recent months, hospitalization data, too, has become less accessible.

Earlier this year, the Department of Health and Human Services ended the requirement for hospitals to report several key COVID-19 metrics, including a daily total of the number of COVID-19 deaths, the number of emergency department overflow and ventilated patients, and information on critical staffing shortages.

“Hospitalization data is now considered a key defining metric for pandemic severity by CDC. At the same time, with massive gaps in data from hospitals and states, it’s hard to peg these data as a gold standard by which policy decisions can be made,” Brownstein explained.

Further, certain states, such as Arizona, have stopped outright reporting of statistics including hospital bed usage and availability, COVID-19 specific hospital metrics and ventilator use.

And last week, one state — New Hampshire — quietly shifted the way it counts COVID-19 related hospitalizations to only include certain severely ill patients in its tally.

Despite an uptick in COVID-19 infections across the Northeast, officials from the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services are now counting COVID-19 hospitalizations by the number of individuals who are currently receiving treatment for the virus with remdesivir, dexamethasone or both therapies — a move that has left some health experts puzzled, as they say the shift may conceal the real impact of COVID-19 on the health system.

According to the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, the new metric is modeled on National Institutes of Health treatment guidelines and “provides a more accurate view of the how many people are hospitalized because of severe COVID-19 illness, as opposed to patients admitted for other health care needs who may incidentally have COVID-19.”

According to the current count, there are 10 patients receiving treatment for COVID-19 in New Hampshire. Comparatively, according to the New Hampshire Hospital Association, there are 83 COVID-19 positive patients receiving care across the state.

“One of the most important metrics has been the total number of people hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19, used by state leadership, hospitals and public health to monitor severity of illness and the prevalence of COVID-19 in New Hampshire,” Steve Ahnen, the president of the New Hampshire Hospital Association, told ABC News.

At this time, nationally, there is still no clear number of how many patients are admitted to the hospital for COVID-19 and how many people have coincidentally tested positive for the virus after they were admitted for other reasons.

Experts say these totals likely vary widely, community by community, and a COVID-19 diagnosis, regardless of the reason behind initial admission, can cause additional strain on a health system.

“Unfortunately, the pandemic has continually exposed the fragile infrastructure of which these data are collected. And now at this late stage in the pandemic, data collecting efforts are starting to fracture even further,” Brownstein added.

‘The pandemic phase of COVID-19 is not yet over’

In the wake of the Gridiron dinner in Washington, D.C., where more than 80 top officials, politicians and journalists — all fully vaccinated — tested positive, health officials from the White House began to shift their messaging surrounding risk levels.

“What’s going to happen is that we’re going to see that each individual is going to have to make their calculation of the amount of risk that they want to take,” Fauci said on ABC’s This Week on Sunday.

Such messaging has raised questions from some health experts who suggest that the U.S. may be leaving some vulnerable Americans behind.

“We’re at a time when U.S. public health authorities are basically declaring ‘People, you’re on your own’ when it comes to determining how to co-exist with COVID-19. Sadly, the tools we’ve relied on to determine risk levels are being discounted at best and discontinued at worst,” Dr. Maureen Miller, professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told ABC News. “It seems we’re trying to have it both ways: People are responsible for their own decisions about risk taking as the pandemic continues but are denied the tools to make informed decisions.”

Early, proactive measures to slow transmission, such as indoor masking, will prevent more extreme measures later, Scarpino said, adding, “Saving lives and livelihoods is what good public health is all about.”

Even if this current surge, due to the omicron subvariant BA.2, is not as explosive as the previous strains, it will still likely take hold in vulnerable parts of the country, Miller said.

“COVID-19 has thrown so many curve balls. It has also provided so many predictable events. Every surge in Europe has preceded a surge in the U.S. Why should this time be different?” Miller explained. “The pandemic phase of COVID-19 is not yet over. We should treat it with the respect that it deserves.”

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(NEW YORK) — Children as young as 8 years old should be screened for anxiety, the country’s leading panel of experts on health prevention recommended Tuesday for the first time.

The new draft guidance comes amid rising rates of anxiety and depression among kids and teens in the U.S., particularly during the pandemic.

Written by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, the guidance suggests children and adolescents between ages 8 and 18 be screened for anxiety. It also doubles down on a prior recommendation to screen for major depressive disorder and suicide among children ages 12 to 18.

The USPSTF also said there are now high enough rates of anxiety and plenty of screening tools and treatments to recommend regular screening of anxiety among 12- to 18-year-olds.

Before COVID-19, the most recent comprehensive national survey found that 8% of children had a current anxiety disorder.

The burden of mental illness has only intensified during the pandemic. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released this month found 37% of youth have experienced poor mental health since March 2020.

This fall, a coalition of child health providers declared that the country was facing a “National Emergency in Child and Adolescent Mental Health.”

The task force noted that untreated anxiety can be debilitating. In the short-term, it can cause physical symptoms, such as unremitting headaches or stomachaches.

Anxiety can also wreak havoc on daily life by leading kids to avoid school, interpersonal activities, or certain other situations.

In the longer term, those disruptions can lead to poor performance and developmental delays.

Additionally, anxiety can increase the risk of poor coping mechanisms such as substance use or development of other forms of mental illness commonly associated with anxiety such as panic attacks or depression.

“To address the critical need for supporting the mental health of children and adolescents in primary care, the Task Force looked at the evidence on screening for anxiety, depression, and suicide risk,” task force member Dr. Martha Kubik said in a statement. “Fortunately, we found that screening older children for anxiety and depression is effective in identifying these conditions so children and teens can be connected to the support they need.”

The agency noted that children with certain adverse childhood experiences, such as trauma, abuse and inter-parental conflict may face particularly high risks, as well as children experiencing poverty, or those from communities of color who may be subject to “historic trauma, structural racism, and biopsychological vulnerability.”

The task force did not offer recommendations on how frequently children should be screened but suggested it may be beneficial for some at-risk children to have repeated screenings over time.

“This worsening crisis in child and adolescent mental health is inextricably tied to the stress brought on by COVID-19,” the authors of the national emergency declaration wrote. “We must identify strategies to meet these challenges … [and] improve the access to and quality of care across the continuum of mental health promotion, prevention, and treatment.”

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(NEW YORK) — In recent years, tinted sunscreens have been rising in popularity, in large part because of their ability to better match a person’s skin tone without leaving a visible white film on the skin.

Responding to customer demand, large skin care brands have recently debuted new tinted sunscreen products that don’t leave a streaky white appearance on the skin.

With these sunscreens being tailored to blend in with the skin, experts are hopeful that this would encourage more people to use them, including those with darker skin tones.

“I think tinted sunscreen is absolutely changing the game in terms of inclusivity,” said Dr. Sonia Batra, a board-certified dermatologist in Santa Monica and a clinical assistant professor of dermatology at the University of Southern California. “It’s also easier to recommend and convince patients to use it as a daily form of protection when it doesn’t look so obvious on their skin and they’re able to blend it and they feel like there are formulations that have been created with them in mind.”

What are tinted sunscreens?

Unlike many traditional sunscreens, tinted sunscreens have the added benefit of protecting against visible light, which can accelerate skin darkening and pigmentation.

“By tailoring the sunscreen formulations to an individual’s skin tone, people are more likely to protect themselves from the sun, therefore reducing their risk of skin cancer,” Dr. Henry Lim, a board-certified dermatologist and the former president of the American Academy of Dermatology, said in a statement.

In a presentation on tinted sunscreens at the recent AAD Annual Meeting in Boston, Lim explained these new developments in sunscreen are now addressing the issue of sunscreen not matching some people’s skin tone.

Like traditional sunscreens products, they also help block ultraviolet radiation, which causes skin cancer and sunburn.

“It’s very important to protect against visible light because we know that in darker-skinned individuals once the skin becomes dark, for example from blemishes from acne, it will take a long time for it to go away,” Lim said. “So that is the reason that protection against visible light is important. That is the reason that tinted sunscreen is quite relevant now.”

Experts said the option of tinted sunscreens is making sunscreens more inclusive and usable for consumers.

“Accessibility has not been really appreciated for many years,” said Dr. Adam Friedman, a board-certified dermatologist, professor and chair of dermatology at George Washington School of Medicine. “But now I think that there is a real drive to make sunscreen use inclusive by providing sunscreens that are appropriate for everybody.”

What to look for in your sunscreens?

With the many new sunscreens on the market, there are some recommendations on what to look for when buying your next sunscreen.

Here are three tips:

1. If you want a tinted sunscreen, look for the word “tinted” on the label.

“Many of them, if they’re tinted will have on the front, a shade like light, medium, medium dark, or they may have a number which has like a little color associated with it,” Batra said.

2. Use a broad-spectrum, water-resistant SPF 30 or higher sunscreen. It is still important and recommended by dermatologists to use any sunscreens that are broad-spectrum, water-resistant and have an SPF of 30 or higher, in addition to wearing sun-protective clothing like breathable long sleeves and wide brim hats.

The SPF number or whether it’s broad-spectrum or water-resistant can also be found on the label. Importantly, everyone should wear sunscreen every day of the year, regardless of the weather and regardless of their skin tone.

3. Try a tinted sunscreen to see how it matches your skin tone. Experts said the appropriate tinted sunscreen shade varies from person to person, depending on each individual’s skin tone and undertone, which is the hue underneath the surface of the skin and affects the overall skin appearance.

The best way to find which one works best for you is trying it first, according to Friedman.

“I think a good rule of thumb whenever trying anything new is exactly that — do a trial, do an experiment,” he said. “Really, the best sunscreen is the one that you’re comfortable using again and again overtime.”

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(WASHINGTON) — The White House says extending the federal mask mandate for airlines and other forms of transportation is still possible despite urging from GOP lawmakers and transportation industry leaders to end the measure, which is set to expire next week.

The decision could be influenced by an increase in COVID-19 cases in the U.S. and a large increase in travelers. The TSA screened 2.6 million travelers on March 20 — a record since the pandemic began and an upward trend many experts expect to continue as summer approaches.

White House COVID-19 response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said extending the public health order is “absolutely on the table” on NBC’s “Today Show” on Monday. Dr. Jha was asked whether rising case numbers could justify extending the order.

“This is a decision that the CDC Director Dr. Walensky is going to make,” Dr. Jha said. “I know the CDC is working on developing a scientific framework for how to answer that. We are going to see that framework come out I think in the next few days.”

CEOs of airlines including Alaska Air, American Airlines, Delta, JetBlue Airways and United sent a letter to President Joe Biden in late March asking him to roll back the mask mandate on airlines as well as the testing requirements for passengers. They pointed to the efficacy of vaccines and to the “burden” enforcing such measures puts on airline staff.

“Now is the time for the Administration to sunset federal transportation travel restrictions – including the international pre-departure testing requirement and the federal mask mandate – that are no longer aligned with the realities of the current epidemiological environment,” the letter said.

“Importantly, the effectiveness and availability of high-quality masks for those who wish to wear them gives passengers the ability to further protect themselves if they choose to do so,” industry leaders said in the letter. “It makes no sense that people are still required to wear masks on airplanes, yet are allowed to congregate in crowded restaurants, schools and at sporting events without masks, despite none of these venues having the protective air filtration system that aircraft do.”

GOP Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Roger Wicker R-Miss., as well as Reps. Sam Graves, R-Mo., and Garret Graves, R-La., also called on the White House to roll back the order in a letter last week.

“At a time when operators across all modes of our Nation’s transportation system are grappling with skyrocketing fuel prices and the lingering impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, the Administration’s policies should reflect nothing less than steadfast support for the transportation sector’s rapid recovery. To that end, we urge you to join us in supporting our Nation’s transportation operators, employees, and users by ending immediately the Federal transportation mask mandate, or allowing it to expire once and for all,” the letter from lawmakers said.

Airlines for America, a group representing major airlines, and other travel industry groups also sent a letter to Dr. Jha last week urging the administration to roll back the COVID mitigation measures.

“Simply put, the pre-departure testing requirement and the mask mandate no longer provide the public health benefits they once did,” the letter said. “Today, these measures are imposing significant costs on the traveling public, airline employees, and the American travel and tourism industries.”

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(NEW YORK) — Opioid overdose deaths in adolescents rose far more rapidly than the general population between 2019 and 2021, according to a new study of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.

The study found that deaths from opioid overdoses in teens ages 14 to 18 increased by 94% between 2019 and 2020 and by an additional 20% between 2020 and 2021.

One specific driver of these deaths was fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that the Drug Enforcement Administration says is 80 to 100 times stronger than morphine.

The researchers, who hailed from multiple institutions, found that adolescent fentanyl-related overdose deaths leapt 350% over the study period. Overall, fentanyl was associated with 77% of adolescent overdose deaths in 2021.

Additionally, specific youth faced elevated risk. Opioid overdose deaths were higher in adolescents from American Indian and Alaska Native and Latinx communities.

The findings come amid the widespread — and rapid — proliferation of fentanyl across the country.

According to the DEA, the number of forensic drug reports testing positive for fentanyl has skyrocketed in recent years from under 20,000 in 2015 to 117,045 in 2020. A recent study from the National Institutes of Health found that the number of individual fentanyl pills seized by law enforcement increased nearly 50-fold from the first quarter of 2018 to the last quarter of 2021.

Even though the adolescent rates outpaced them, adults haven’t been spared from the rising ubiquity of fentanyl. Provisional data released by the CDC in March showed that overdose deaths across age groups had reached record highs, taking the lives of nearly 106,000 Americans within the prior year.

These deaths were in large part driven by fentanyl.

A separate CDC study showed that of the more than 100,000 people who died from drug overdoses between May 2020 and April 2021, nearly two-thirds were linked to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.

Overall, deaths linked to synthetic opioids have nearly doubled in Americans of any age over the past two years, the provisional data showed.

Advocates say that the record highs in overdose deaths highlight the importance of adopting new strategies to combat the opiate epidemic.

“Urgent action is needed to address America’s spiraling overdose crisis, including expanding access to opioid addiction treatment and investing in harm reduction,” the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health care research organization, wrote in a February report, “but these lifesaving tools continue to be underutilized and resistance remains strong in many areas of the country.”

The authors of the study echoed those recommendations for youth specifically.

“Increasing adolescent overdose deaths, in the context of increasing availability of illicit fentanyls, highlight the need for accurate harm-reduction education for adolescents and greater access to naloxone and services for mental health and substance use behavior,” the authors wrote.

According to guidance by the U.S. Surgeon General, individual citizens also have an important role to play. The guidance recommends that individuals learn the signs of opioid overdose — including slowed breathing and pinpoint pupils — and get trained in the use of naloxone, a potent antidote for opioid overdoses.

“Knowing how to use naloxone and keeping it within reach can save a life,” the guidance reads.

Eli Cahan, MS, is a contributor to the ABC News medical unit. He is a fourth year medical student at NYU School of Medicine and will be starting his residency in pediatrics at UCSF in June.

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(TALLAHASSEE, Fla.) — Health officials are warning Florida residents about a “large” outbreak of a potentially fatal bacterial illness known as meningococcal disease that’s primarily affecting gay and bisexual men.

So far this year, there have been 21 confirmed cases of meningococcal disease as of Monday, according to Florida Department of Health data. That’s higher than the state’s five-year average of cases of the disease.

“[Florida Department of Health] epidemiologists are investigating each case as well as contacting people with potential or direct exposure to known cases to provide them with information and treatment options,” the department said in a statement.

Most of the cases are in central Florida, and more than half are in people between the ages of 20 and 39, according to state health department data.

The “large, ongoing” outbreak is primarily among men who have sex with men, including those living with HIV, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC recently issued an alert on the outbreak, urging gay and bisexual men and men who have sex with men who live in Florida or who plan to travel to the state to get vaccinated against the disease. The outbreak is primarily among residents, though it has affected some people who have traveled to Florida, the CDC said.

There also have been cases of meningococcal disease reported among Florida college students in recent months, though “there is no evidence to suggest that the cases among college students are related to the larger outbreak,” the CDC said.

Meningococcal disease is a rare but serious disease that is primarily spread by close or direct contact, such as kissing. Symptoms include fever, headache, stiff neck, nausea, vomiting, light sensitivity, confusion and rash.

Meningococcal disease can commonly lead to two potentially fatal infections: meningitis — when the lining of the brain and spinal cord become infected — and bloodstream infection.

Those who contract the disease could suffer from hearing loss, brain damage, kidney damage, loss of limbs or nervous system problems.

“Getting vaccinated is the best way to protect against meningococcal disease,” the Florida Department of Health said.

Florida health officials are encouraging men who have sex with men, people living with HIV, immunocompromised individuals and college students to get vaccinated against the disease amid the outbreak. Anyone in those groups who more than five years ago received their MenACWY vaccine — one of two types of meningococcal vaccines available in the U.S. — is also encouraged to get vaccinated.

People planning to travel to Florida should get vaccinated at least two weeks before traveling, the CDC advised.

College students may choose to get a MenB vaccine, which is available for those between the ages of 16 and 23, to protect against meningococcal disease, the CDC said.

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(NEW YORK) — Cases of several sexually transmitted diseases continued to increase during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new federal report.

Published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Tuesday, the report found STD cases fell during the early months of 2020 but resurged later in the year.

Overall, 2.4 million STD cases were reported in the U.S. in 2020, a slight decrease from the 2.5 million cases reported in 2019.

However, the decreases observed in early 2020 may have been a result of significant reductions in screening and reporting associated with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the CDC noted.

“Many jurisdictions reported critical effects on staffing and testing and treatment supplies, straining an already crumbling public health infrastructure,” the agency wrote in the report, meaning “COVID-19 significantly affected STD surveillance and prevention efforts.”

Specifically, cases of gonorrhea, syphilis and congenital syphilis were higher than levels seen in 2019 despite lockdowns, stay-at-home orders and school closures.

Cases of chlamydia — which represent about two-thirds of total STD cases — were lower in 2020.

“There were moments in 2020 when it felt like the world was standing still, but STDs weren’t,” Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of CDC’s National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, said in a statement. “The unrelenting momentum of the STD epidemic continued even as STD prevention services were disrupted.”

In terms of specific diseases, the report found cases of gonorrhea were up 10% in 2020, from about 616,000 to more than 677,000. Additionally, cases of syphilis increased 7% from nearly 39,000 to more than 41,000.

Cases of congenital syphilis, which occurs when a mother passes on the disease to her baby during pregnancy, spiked 15% from about 1,900 in 2019 to more than 2,100. This occurred in the broader context of what the CDC has called a “resurgence” in congenital syphilis with annual case counts skyrocketing 235% since 2016.

The CDC said these increases are particularly “worrisome” because congenital syphilis — which is easily preventable with screening and treatment — has serious risks including life-long physical and mental health risks for babies, miscarriage and stillbirth.

Because congenital syphilis occurs in communities of color at rates several times higher than among whites, officials fear the rises in the disease spreading from mother to child will perpetuate health disparities.

“This … highlights the nation’s failure to provide sufficient, quality sexual health care for everyone who needs it,” Dr. Leandro Mena, director of CDC’s Division of STD Prevention, said during a media telebriefing Tuesday.

On its face, the one silver lining of the report found chlamydia cases decreased 13%, to about 1.6 million from 1.8 million.

However, the CDC cautioned that, because the disease is typically asymptomatic, these decreases were more likely due to screening shortfalls than to drops in infections.

During the telebriefing, the agency elaborated on some of the causes of the shortcomings in screening.

Mermin said “STD program resources were heavily diverted to address COVID-19” — including shunting of contact tracing staff. Half of programs discontinued STD prevention field work during most of 2020.

Additionally, Mena said more than half of the programs reported shortages in testing and treatment supplies during the pandemic.

The report also addressed which groups saw the highest rates of STDs.

Half of all STDs reported in the U.S. in 2020 were among 15-to-24-year-olds.

STD rates were also higher across the board among certain racial and ethnic groups – including Black, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaskan Native – compared to white and Asian Americans.

Gay and bisexual men were also disproportionately affected — particularly by syphilis — than other groups.

Rates in certain regions also soared far above the national average. For example, in Mississippi, rates of chlamydia were 167% higher than the national average, and rates of gonorrhea were 224% higher.

Similar patterns were seen in other states throughout the South, including Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama.

If the country fails to “rebuild, innovate, and expand” STD prevention resources in the coming years, Mermin said he expects STD rates will continue to rise.

“STDs are not patiently waiting for the pandemic to end, and neither can we,” the agency wrote in its report.

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(OKLAHOMA CITY) — It will now be a felony to perform an abortion in Oklahoma under a bill signed into law Tuesday by Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt.

The bill passed in the state House last week without any debate after passing the Senate last year.

Under the bill, any medical provider who performs an abortion would face a fine of $100,000 and up to 10 years in prison. The only exceptions for performing an abortion would be if the mother’s life is in danger.

The new law is scheduled to take effect in August, but it is expected to be challenged in court.

Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Center for Reproductive Rights have said they will “challenge any ban that is signed into law in Oklahoma this session.”

“The law signed today is not yet in effect, and abortion remains legal in Oklahoma,” Emily Wales, interim CEO and president of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, said in a statement.

The new abortion restriction in Oklahoma is particularly significant because of the outsized role the state has played in providing abortion access to women in the region since last year, when Texas enacted a law that bans nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.

So far in 2022, the two Planned Parenthood clinics in Oklahoma that offer abortion services have seen more patients from Texas than from Oklahoma, according to Wales.

“We know that patients who need abortion are not going to stop seeking it, it’s just going to get harder and harder for them to access,” Wales told ABC News last week, when the bill passed the Oklahoma state House.. “Right now, patients may be traveling a few hundred miles from home, five or six hours, they’re going to add another five or six hours to get to the Kansas City area or to Wichita, and for some patients, that won’t be feasible.”

Dr. Christina Bourne, medical director of Trust Women, which operates an abortion care clinic in Oklahoma City and one in Wichita, Kansas, said the clinics are having to turn people away because of the demand.

“We are essentially having to turn the vast majority of people away from getting abortions because we just cannot keep up with the volume,” Bourne said last week. “We could be doing abortions 24 hours a day and not keep up with the volume that is demanded of us.”

The Oklahoma legislature is also still considering more legislation to restrict abortion access, including a bill that passed the House last month that is modeled after Texas’s law and allows for citizens to sue for up to $10,000 anyone who performs or “aids and abets” an abortion. The Oklahoma Senate has also passed several anti-abortion measures recently, including a bill that allows for private lawsuits.

Abortion access at a greater distance

Experts say that in light of more restrictions, women who have the means will have to travel further for abortion care, while those who don’t will not get care.

“We expect that the facilities that remain open in other states will be overwhelmed, as we have already seen with Senate Bill 8, with residents from other states coming in to get care,” said Dr. Kari White, an associate professor and faculty research associate at the University of Texas at Austin. “And there are some people for whom these longer distances are are just going to be impossible, and they will consider either other ways to try to end their pregnancies by ordering medications online or potentially doing something unsafe, and other people will be forced to continue their pregnancies.”

White, who is also the lead investigator of the Texas Policy Evaluation Project, has studied the impact of Texas’ six-week abortion ban. According to her research, around 1,400 Texans have gone to another state for abortion care each month since SB8 went into effect in September, with 45% traveling to Oklahoma.

“We’ve certainly heard from some of the people we’ve interviewed in our study that they were willing to wait a little bit longer to get an abortion in Oklahoma because they could travel to Oklahoma, but it was too far for them to go to a state like New Mexico,” she said. “They just couldn’t make it work in terms of the additional cost, the time away from work or their child care responsibilities.”

New Mexico and Colorado, which have less stringent abortion restrictions, are likely to become hotspots for women in the region who have the means to travel for abortion care.

Those states have also felt the impact from SB8, according to Planned Parenthood, which reported a more than 1000% increase in abortion patients with Texas zip codes at Planned Parenthood health centers in Colorado and a more than 100% increase at Planned Parenthood health centers in New Mexico compared to the previous year.

Other states that surround Oklahoma — Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas — face their own restrictions on abortion access and are dealing with already overwhelmed systems, experts say.

The two Planned Parenthood clinics that provided abortion care in Missouri have been closed in the law few years due to state restrictions, according to Wales, who added, “Missourians for a long time have been living the Texas crisis, where the majority of them are forced to flee their home state for care already.”

Arkansas has around three abortion clinics statewide currently, while Kansas has four, according to Sandy Brown, president of the Kansas Abortion Fund, a volunteer-run, nonprofit organization that helps fund Kansan women seeking abortion care.

“Our clinics here have been swamped,” Brown said. “They just can’t absorb the volume of people coming in from other states. Now, if Oklahoma happens, it’s really, really going to be bad, because we already can’t almost handle the patients that are coming in now.”

More states expected to act after anticipated Supreme Court ruling

Currently, it is unconstitutional to pass abortion bans before a fetus is viable — anywhere from 22 to 26 weeks.

In May or June, the Supreme Court will announce its ruling on a 15-week ban in Mississippi and whether or not it is constitutional. If the Supreme Court determines the ban is constitutional, it could mean Roe v. Wade is either overturned or fundamentally weakened.

More than half of the nation’s 50 states are prepared to ban abortion if Roe is overturned, according to a report from the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights organization.

If that happens, another factor to watch will be whether states that have banned abortion make it increasingly difficult for their residents to obtain abortions in other states, Mary Ziegler, visiting professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and author of “Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present,” told ABC News earlier this year.

In the meantime, abortion rights advocates and providers say they worry that the far distances people are having to travel to seek abortion care means the most vulnerable people, such as those without the financial resources to travel, are being left behind.

“Traveling is an option and has always been an option for affluent white people,” Bourne said. “Through abortion restrictions, we are legislating people who experience intersecting identities, poverty, people of color, queer folks, people with many children, people with busy lives who are going to be left out of that and forced to carry a pregnancy to term that perhaps otherwise wouldn’t have.”

Wales, of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, said that as clinics in Oklahoma and Kansas have seen increased demand for abortion services, that has resulted in a delay in services for the type of general reproductive health care, like contraception and cancer screening, that makes up the majority of the clinics’ work.

“The increased need in abortion and the restrictions from the states … those things have pushed family planning patients and other types of care back,” Wales said. “It also means our family planning patients are coming in more concerned, more confused about what is available to them, because they just understand that rights are being restricted.”

“It has created a great deal of fear, I think, among the people we see,” she said.

ABC News’ Mary Ketakos contributed to this report.

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(NEW YORK) — A 27-year-old New York man can walk less than two years after being paralyzed when he was hit by a car while on a bicycle.

Cory Moses, of Brooklyn, was on his way to meet his then-partner on Oct. 25, 2020, when he said someone in a parked car opened a car door into him, sending him flying into the street, where he was hit by another car.

As a result of the accident, Moses, who had just celebrated his 25th birthday, suffered six fractured ribs, two broken arms and a fractured spine, which caused paralysis.

“I remember not wanting to look down. I thought my lower half had been severed,” Moses, who said he eventually looked down at his legs after a bystander told him he was not bleeding, told ABC News’ Good Morning America. “The lower half of my body was at a weird angle and I definitely knew something was wrong.”

“I felt the feeling drain from my legs,” he said.

Moses said he underwent three surgeries and spent two weeks in the intensive care unit. Before his first surgery, Moses said he was told he may never walk again.

“My first surgeon said she’d stabilize my spine as much as she could but from the damage I probably wouldn’t be able to walk or move my legs again,” he said. “They added two rods and eight screws to my back to stabilize it, which took about 12 to 13 hours in total because of how severe the damage was.”

After the surgery, Moses said he was not able to move his left leg at all but could very slightly move his right leg, which gave him and his medical team hope.

“[The surgeon] said that with that, there was still some connection,” Moses said. “They couldn’t tell me how much of a recovery I’d make, but I’d get something back.”

After his first three surgeries, Moses was transferred to The Mount Sinai Hospital, where he underwent two more surgeries and spent nearly three months recovering.

Moses said he realized how severe and life-changing his injuries would be, but he remained determined to overcome them.

“Within my first week or so at Mount Sinai is when I got myself into a place of peace and an understanding that if I’m going to get out of the hospital and into rehab that my mind and my focus has to be there. I can’t lose that to my feelings or depression,” he said.

Moses, who was working as a contractor for a construction business at the time of his injury, took on his rehabilitation work as a full-time job. He learned how to navigate life in a wheelchair, while also practicing on an exoskeleton program, which is a machine that helps patients with spinal cord injuries relearn how to walk.

“I put a lot of work into making my recovery fun,” he said. “I never wanted it to feel like a chore.”

Even after Moses was discharged in January 2021, three months after his accident, he went back to the hospital several days a week for physical therapy, according to Dr. Liz Pike, physical therapist with the Department of Rehabilitation and Human Performance at The Mount Sinai Hospital.

“It takes a lot of time for the body to heal just from a neurological injury and he put in the work and really listened to his body and did all the steps and kind of built the foundation blocks to get to the bigger movements, like walking and balancing,” said Pike. “He took his off time to work on strengthening and stretching and just being healthy in general, like eating well.”

Moses set a goal for himself to be able to walk before the one-year anniversary of his accident. He reached that goal last October, taking his first steps on his own in his apartment.

“I remember feeling really proud of myself,” he said. “It just reassured me that really having a strong mentality makes a difference.”

Dr. Angela Riccobono, rehab psychologist with the Department of Rehabilitation and Human Performance at The Mount Sinai Hospital, who worked with Moses, said in her 20-plus years of experience, she’s never seen someone overcome adversity with “such grace and a positive mindset.”

“He understood early on that with the right mindset and the right people around you, there was little that could stop him,” Riccobono said of Moses.

Defying the odds, Moses has progressed to being able to walk as far as 10 city blocks on his own, according to Pike.

“I think they were hopeful he would be able to use some assisted device to do some standing and some activities like that but were unable to say how far he’d be able to walk, like he is now,” Pike said.

Moses still utilizes crutches and leg braces to walk if he is going a longer distance, and relies on his wheelchair at times, too, as he continues to build his strength.

He lives on his own and works at a local school while also working to fulfill his next dream, competing in the Paralympic Games in fencing, a sport Moses said he had always wanted to play as a kid but was never able to because it was not accessible.

After the accident, Moses got a chance to try fencing thanks to his friend, Curtis McDowald, a member of the U.S. Fencing team for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, who invited him to a training facility in New York City.

Moses committed himself to the sport and took home two medals in his first competition in January in California.

“The goal is Paralympics,” said Moses. “I’m the type that whenever I do something, I want to do it to the maximum.”

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