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Given how much Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done to scare Americans away from vaccines, it seems inevitable that a runaway measles epidemic will ensue. Dozens of cases in rural West Texas might already be the start of one. As Kennedy takes office as secretary of health and human services, the world’s most transmissible virus is challenging him to an arm-wrestling match, and it’s one that the iron-pumping health advocate cannot win. (Donald G. McNeil Jr., 2/20)

Unfortunately, bird flu is no longer confined to birds. For several years, the virus has been jumping from wild birds into wild mammals, and last March it was identified in cows for the first time. Scientists are sounding the alarm: Bird flu’s jump into an animal with which humans have such close contact is a serious warning sign. If this outbreak isn’t controlled, the virus could mutate and plunge humans into a new public health emergency. (Maryn McKenna, 2/20)

If there is one lesson we should have learned from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is that promoting public health around the world also strengthens health at home. (Widney Brown, 2/21)

When President John F. Kennedy asked Congress to establish the U.S. Agency for International Development in 1961, he rooted its mission in America’s strategic interests and its “moral obligations as a wise leader and good neighbor,” recognizing that poverty and instability threaten America’s prosperity and security. That convergence of interests and values, upheld across Republican and Democratic administrations, is now at risk. (Jeremy Konyndyk, 2/21)

When a CBS News medical correspondent claimed this week that we’re accumulating a plastic spoon’s worth of plastic in our brains, her colleagues looked horrified, and for good reason. Surely, that much plastic would gunk up our cognitive machinery. You probably don’t have quite that much of the stuff in your brain, but the idea of any plastic piling up there is still unnerving. (F.D. Flam, 2/20)