{"id":181906,"date":"2025-09-26T00:48:22","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T00:48:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/181906\/"},"modified":"2025-09-26T00:48:22","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T00:48:22","slug":"tylenols-70-year-history-from-kids-drug-to-political-controversy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/181906\/","title":{"rendered":"Tylenol’s 70-year history: From kids’ drug to political controversy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Megan Molteni reports on discoveries from the frontiers of genomic medicine, neuroscience, and reproductive tech. She joined STAT in 2021 after covering health and science at WIRED. You can reach Megan on Signal at mmolteni.13.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been 70 years since Philadelphia-based McNeil Laboratories introduced the first pure acetaminophen product to American consumers: Elixir Tylenol, a prescription painkiller and fever treatment for kids. Advertised as being \u201cfor little hotheads,\u201d the medicine came in a red paper carton shaped like a fire engine.<\/p>\n

Since then, it\u2019s become one of the world\u2019s most ubiquitous drugs, but also one whose safety has periodically been challenged, as it was this week when President Trump forcefully and publicly urged pregnant women to abstain from taking Tylenol<\/a>, asserting, without clear scientific evidence, a potential link to autism.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s perhaps surprising that a product so widely used would become a medicinal scapegoat. Trump\u2019s statements at an extraordinary press conference<\/a> Monday have drawn a flood of pushback<\/a> from medical societies, autism organizations, and pediatric experts. But acetaminophen\u2019s long and twisting origin story, going back four centuries to indigenous people\u2019s use of the cinnamon-colored bark of the Cinchona tree in the febrile jungles of Peru, is pocked with safety scares \u2014 sometimes unfounded, other times real. It\u2019s a history that casts just enough ambient uncertainty to invite in the type of conspiratorial thinking fueling the politically ascendant<\/a> Make America Healthy Again movement.<\/p>\n

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