Public Health Situation Analysis: El Niño in the Americas, 2026-2027. 24 June 2026 - Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)

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Controversial vaccine researchers who have been praised by Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary, had their offices in Guinea-Bissau raided by judicial police, who seized doses of hepatitis B vaccines, officials said on Facebook. The researchers have been at the heart of an ongoing dispute over research on African newborns, supported by $1.6m from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and matched by the Pershing Square Foundation and the Bluebell Foundation for a total of $3.2m. The police search took place on Monday, involving “investigative procedures aimed at clarifying the circumstances related to the said batch of vaccines”, according to the social media post, which was translated from Portuguese. The announcement noted that seizing the immunizations did not point to “irregularities in the quality, safety, or effectiveness of the vaccines”. The Bandim Health Project recently posted a letter of approval for the trial from Guinea-Bissau’s national ethics committee at the ministry of public health, dated 14 July and signed by the committee’s president, Mouhammed Djicó Ould Ahmed.

Reducing damage to the nuclei of heart muscle cells improved heart function and dramatically extended survival in mice with a form of inherited heart disease, according to a new study led by Cornell researchers. The findings point to new approaches for understanding and potentially treating LMNA-related dilated cardiomyopathy, a disease that leads to heart failure and sudden cardiac death. The study, published in Circulation Research, was directed by Jan Lammerding, a professor in the Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering in the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering and a member of the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology, and jointly led by Noam Zuela-Sopilniak and Julien L. P. Morival in his group. Co-corresponding author Iwijn De Vlaminck is also a professor in the Meinig School.  LMNA-related dilated cardiomyopathy is an inherited heart disease caused by mutations in the LMNA gene, which encodes lamin A and lamin C, proteins that help maintain the structural integrity of a cell’s nucleus. Although researchers have identified a link between LMNA mutations and heart disease, they do not completely understand the cellular mechanisms that lead to heart damage.