Science Faces a Hostile Takeover
“The scariest things I’ve experienced in my forty-plus years” as a federally funded researcher, says U-M nursing school professor Janet Larson.
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Health
Encouraging Health Trends
In its 2025 annual report, released in late April, the Washtenaw County Health Department announced a promising decline in deaths from opioid overdoses, firearms, and suicides in 2024. Firearm deaths continued to drop in 2025, and preliminary data show a similar trend for opioid overdoses and suicides. With all three issues nationally recognized as public health crises, why has Washtenaw County been so successful?
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Waiting for the Medicine to Kick In
In June 2025, Michigan Medicine opened the doors of the Ypsilanti Health Center at 300 W. Michigan Ave. with a mission that was twofold: to improve health outcomes and the social determinants of health in a city that has long trailed Ann Arbor in both.
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Walkable, but Inaccessible
Does A2 Summer Streets shut out people with disabilities?
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This Year’s Big Health Scare
The public fight between Michigan Medicine and Blue Cross Blue Shield is tormenting the patients and families who depend on them both.
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Kratom Invasion
Kratom is a natural pain remedy and pick-me-up with a wide following. But a dangerous lab-made version is hitting the health care and recovery communities hard.
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All the Lonely People
People experience loneliness when “perceptions of their social relationships don’t match what they would ideally like them to be. Not everyone who feels lonely is truly alone and not everyone who is socially isolated feels lonely,” says University of Michigan social epidemiologist Lindsay Kobayashi. The importance of third places—low-cost or free community spaces like parks, coffee shops, and libraries where people can find connection outside of home (a first place) and work (a second place)—is becoming a more popular topic in public health research.
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Menopause Matters
Menopause and the menopause transition “remains one of the most overlooked and underserved areas in medicine,” according to the Menopause Society, a nonprofit focused on educating health care professionals.
Read MoreTarget: Public Health
“We don’t have the capacity or technical expertise to do research,” explains Washtenaw County Health Department (WCHD) administrator Susan Ringler-Cerniglia. “The CDC has critical resources when we need to respond at the local level. In the case of an unusual pathogen, we call on the CDC. It’s incredibly frightening to feel like we may not be able to rely on them.”
Read MoreTarget: Medicaid
Mates watched the passage of President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” in July with alarm. It will slash Medicaid funding by about $1 trillion over ten years—and the “big juicy target” is support for people with disabilities like her son Corbin.
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Lyme Disease Alert
Chelsi Preuc at the Washtenaw County Health Department says that through June, the department received reports of eighty-five cases of Lyme disease, up from fifty in the same period last year.
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Research at Risk
The Trump administration’s drive to disrupt the federal government is already having an outsized effect on Ann Arbor, from social services to climate activism. (For the impact on just one nonprofit, see Doomsday Planning.) But none matches the economic destruction threatened by a February announcement from the National Institutes of Health, which provides $800 million of the U-M’s $2 billion in annual research funding. The edict would set grantees’ “indirect cost” reimbursement at 15 percent.
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Eggflation
“I just happened to look back at an invoice from January of 2022, and we were selling eggs for $23 a case,” says Washtenaw Dairy owner Mary Jean Raab. “Yesterday I paid $83 a case.” Another supplier was asking $147.
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Gifts of Life
Dorrie Dils became president and CEO of Gift of Life Michigan in 2016. At the time, she says, the Ann Arbor–based agency was “averaging about 280 organ donors a year.” The number has since more than doubled, to 578 last year.
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Magic Mushrooms
In 2020, Ann Arbor became one of the first cities in the country to decriminalize the sale of “magic mushrooms.” Now Hosanagar is coinvestigator on a study of psilocybin, the fungus’s psychoactive ingredient, for treatment-resistant depression.
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Eli Lilly, Patron of the Arts
The pharmaceutical giant started with a single location in the Original Fair on North University in 2022. This year, it will be everywhere as the first-ever presenting sponsor of all three fairs.
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Cancer Gratitude
An Ann Arbor native, Joan Belgrave is a two-time Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter. Four years after her husband died, her life took another dramatic turn when a routine biopsy resulted in an especially dangerous diagnosis: “triple-negative” breast cancer.
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Lyme Disease Outbreak
“The number of cases has exploded,” says Beth Ann Hamilton, communications coordinator for the Washtenaw County Health Department.
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Seniors Betrayed
With great wealth come great opportunities for financial exploitation. According to a 2023 report from the Justice Department’s Office of Victims of Crime, senior-service agencies that the office funds report that 14 percent of the people seeking their help are victims of financial crimes.
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Caregivers in the Family
Rosanita Ratcliff is a born traveler. She left Ann Arbor to go to college in Arizona, studied...
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