2025-01-27
10 分钟Happy Monday, listeners.
For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman.
Let's kick off the week by catching up on some of the latest science news.
First, we've got a quick update from one of our SIAM correspondents.
On January 20,
President Donald Trump signed an executive order stating his intention to withdraw the US from the World Health Organization,
or who.
Here to unpack that for us is Tanya Lewis,
a senior editor covering health and medicine at Scientific American.
The World Health Organization is an agency of the United Nations.
It was founded in 1948, and it has nearly 200 member states.
It has a pretty broad scope,
from working to expand healthcare access around the world to responding to disease outbreaks and pandemics.
So Trump issued an executive order that signaled that he intends to withdraw from the who,
but the full process actually takes a year.
He tried to do this during his last term, but Biden reversed it before it took effect.
Trump said he's withdrawing because he thinks the organization handled the COVID pandemic poorly and
because he thinks the US Pays an unfair share of the agency's funding.
It's true that we do pay the most of any member country,
but most of our contributions are actually voluntary and earmarked for specific projects.