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Some U.S. health regulators who review medical devices and tobacco products for safety and efficacy are struggling to meet deadlines mandated by Congress due to Trump administration layoffs, three scientists working on the projects told Reuters. Two of the scientists who work at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said they had been assigned around double the number of new product applications for review since their colleagues were fired. They requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions. They said they were instructed to shelve other work, including oversight of other reviewers and providing early feedback on planned product applications before they are submitted for approval review. One scientist at the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products said the center had delayed starting new applications while staff worked on existing submissions, some with reviews that must be completed within 180 days under U.S. law. Several tobacco-related research projects have also been canceled, he said. “We have 180 days to complete those (existing) reviews, and we’re not going to come anywhere close to that. It’s just not going to happen,” the scientist said. A medical device reviewer said they were working to the wire to meet some deadlines. The FDA did not respond to a request for comment. The U.S. Department of Government Efficiencyled by billionaire Elon Muskfired around 1,000 probationary FDA employees last month, mostly from the agencys centers for tobacco, food, and medical devices, before bringing some back. Reuters could not confirm the final number of staff fired. The FDA had more than 20,000 workers earlier this year. Ameet Sarpatwari, a professor at Harvard Medical School, said the FDA’s loss of personnel and institutional experience could lead the agency to spend longer on reviews, resulting in products coming to market later, or spend less time on individual applications, increasing the risk of missing any red flags. CANCELED MEETINGS A lawyer specializing in FDA regulation, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said her clients at large medical device companies were deeply concerned that the FDA would start missing deadlines. Medical device industry group AdvaMed said the organization was hearing similar concerns, a spokesperson said. Eva Temkin, a lawyer at Arnold & Porter who advises clients on medical device applications, said the FDA had canceled some meetings with companies or reverted to providing written responses only. The FDA last year approved more than 3,000 medical devices, around three-dozen of which were for original, high-risk devices like Medtronic’s Affera system to treat atrial fibrillation, and more than 250 applications for tobacco products, according to agency databases. It is currently reviewing high-profile projects including one from Philip Morris International that seeks approval for a new iteration of its heated tobacco device IQOS. Philip Morris did not respond to a request for comment. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA, submitted plans for further layoffs to the Trump administration earlier this month. The administration had been offering $25,000 buyouts to FDA employees, excluding reviewers, investigators, and security personnel, and early retirement ahead of that proposal, according to agency emails viewed by Reuters. A second scientist in the tobacco division said he had been given more complicated applications to review, which require more in-depth study, after over a dozen people were fired in his office, while simpler submissions assigned to him had been put on pause. He said he had also been given a regulatory memorandum to work on by himself that would normally be compiled by as many as six scientists. Some of the probationary workers laid off from the FDAs tobacco center had been recruited last year for their understanding of emerging technologies, such as age verification software for electronic cigarettes, according to the first scientist. “We needed a greater variety of expertise, and we lost that. And so that has left us scrambling quite a bit,” he said. Patrick Wingrove, Reuters
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At the beginning of the hit 2003 movie Love Actually, Hugh Grants character muses that whenever he gets gloomy about the state of the world, he redirects his attention to the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. Another remedy would be to consider the vast natural wonders of space, but perhaps that’s more of a William Shatner move. Regardless of your leading-man preference, if you are in need of some wonder this week, there will be a partial solar eclipse early Saturday morning visible in certain parts of the world. Heres what that all means and where and how to best see it. What is a partial solar eclipse? The moon orbits the Earth while our home planet orbits the sun. When the moon travels between the sun and Earth, an eclipse takes place. The type depends on how the three moving objects line up. If it is not in a perfect line, a partial eclipse occurs. If it is a perfect line, the sun is completely blocked and a total eclipse occurs. (Cue Bonnie Tyler.) When the moon travels between the sun and the Earth while at its farthest point away from Earth, this is called an annular solar eclipse. (No great pop songs have yet been written about this phenomenon.) When and where can you see the partial solar eclipse? The eclipse will take place on Saturday, March 29, 2025. According to NASA, people in the northeastern United States, Europe, western Africa, eastern Canada, and over the Atlantic Ocean are in for a show. Shortly after a beautiful sunrise, those on the East Coast of the United States will witness a partial solar eclipse. Those in New York City should expect it to begin at 6:44 a.m ET. Things kick off even earlier in Boston at 6:31 a.m. The folks at NASA have compiled a handy list of major cities and the exact timeline for your convenience.� NASA.gov What is the best way to view the eclipse? The first rule of viewing a partial solar eclipse is safety. You cannot look directly at it without damaging your eyes. You need solar eclipse glasses. The American Astronomical Society has a list of approved vendors, which can help you procure some.� Other than that, set multiple alarms to ensure you dont sleep or work through it. If you need a hand waking up, brew some coffee. Then look up and marvel at the sky and for a moment feel a small part of a larger universejust like Captain Kirk.
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E-Commerce
You’ve heard of burner phones. What about burner email?So much of the internet now requires that you hand over your email address before you’re able to use any servicesfrom an app you’ve downloaded to signing up for a newsletter or redeeming a special offer online.But who says you have to give your real email address? Next time you’re asked, consider using an email mask.There are a growing number of services that give out disguised email addresses and relay any messages to your actual address. Experts say this can be a powerful tool to safeguard privacy and security.Here are some pointers on the whys and hows of email masking: Mask on The idea behind email masking is simple. The masking service gives you a randomized address you can use as a decoy instead of your actual email. It can be a series of unrelated words, or a string of letters and numbers. When someone sends a message to the burner email, it will be automatically routed to your address without anyone knowing.Providers include privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection service, Firefox Relay from browser maker Mozilla, email service FastMail, and independent services like Addy.io. The encrypted service Proton Mail offers email masking with its password manager and standalone SimpleLogin service. There are many others.It’s one of the features Apple offers users subscribing to its iCloud+ or Apple One services. When you’re using the Safari browser app on your iPhone and need to input your email, you can tap the field above the onscreen keyboard to “Hide My Email,” which then creates a random address as a substitute.It’s also available on Mac computers with the desktop Safari browser or Mail app. If you’re using a different browser or app, you can still manually create a random email address by going into your iCloud settings. A Key Feature Most services have a free version with basic options and a premium tier with more features.Some free services can only receive emails but not reply to them. However, an important feature users should look for is the ability to do both, said Proton CEO Andy Yen.“Maybe you never reply to a newsletter and that’s fine,” said Yen. But it’s a problem if, for example, you used your email alias to buy something online and there’s an issue with your order that the site needs to ask you about.“Then the ability to reply is actually pretty important,” he said.Most masking services have a dashboard control panel where you can view the various alias addresses you’ve activated. If you notice one starting to get a lot of spam, just turn it off. When should I use it? Mask your email when you want to add an extra layer of privacy or protect yourself from data leaks or unauthorized information sharing.An email mask is a “general-purpose tool that can be used in any context,” says Santiago Andrigo, principal product manager at Mozilla.However, he recommends using it in two key situations. The first is when you’re unsure what a website will do with your email address.“Masking your email gives you controlif you start receiving unwanted messages, you can easily block any emails coming to that email mask,” Andrigo said.The second scenario is “when your association with a service could reveal sensitive personal information,” he said. For example, if you join an online community for a specific medical condition or a minority group, a data breach could expose your participation. Email fail There are myriad reasons not to give out your email address to anyone who wants it.It could be sold to marketers or shady data brokers, eroding your privacy by helping them build a profile of you for legitimate or nefarious purposes.If your address ends up on the wrong mailing list, it could result in more junk or phishing emails. And if an online service is hacked, attackers could make off with logins, passwords and other personal information.Using unique passwords for all your online accountstypically with the help of a password manageris good cybersecurity practice. “But the real pain point for any user is actually not the password getting leaked, but actually the email getting leaked,” said Yen.Changing your password after a data breach is standard practice but it’s a lot harder to change another piece of sensitive information, your email addressunless you’re using a mask. False solutions There are other so-called hacks that you might have heard about.You could set up a throwaway account with a free email service like Gmail or Yahoo. But it’s tedious to do this.Some Gmail users add a plus sign and an extra phrase or combination of characters between their username and the @ sign. It helps track who’s sharing your address as well as filter messages.But “from a privacy standpoint, that does nothing,” said Yen. “Because people can just simply take away the plus and get your original address.” What about the man in the middle? Email masks use their servers to relay message traffic between the sender and the recipient. So how can you be sure those servers are private?Look for reputable providers that promise not to keep your messages. If you’re shopping around for an email masking service, Yen advises checking if it has “proper terms and conditions,” a privacy policy and is based in a jurisdiction where it could be legally held accountable.“We state very clearly we’re not keeping a copy of anything that passes through our servers,” Yen said.Firefox Relay says in its FAQs that it does not “read or store any of your messages.”“In the event that an email cannot be delivered to you, we will keep it on our servers and delete it after it has been delivered (in no event will we hold onto it for more than three days),” it says.Apple says it “doesn’t read or process any of the content” in email messages that pass through Hide My Email except for standard spam filtering.“All email messages are deleted from our relay servers after they’re delivered to you, usually within seconds,” the iPhone maker says. AP Technology Writer Barbara Ortutay in Oakland, Calif. contributed to this report. Is there a tech topic that you think needs explaining? Write to us at onetechtip@ap.org with your suggestions for future editions of One Tech Tip. Kelvin Chan, AP Business Writer
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