Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by the editors of HealthDay:

Trump Appoints Fossil Fuel Industry Ally to Lead EPA

A fossil fuel industry ally and opponent of policies to fight climate change has been appointed to run the Environmental Protection Agency in Donald Trump’s administration.

Republican Scott Pruitt is the Oklahoma attorney general and has been a leader of legal challenges against President Barack Obama’s programs to combat climate change, The New York Times reported.

In the presidential campaign, Trump claimed that the established science of human-caused climate change is a hoax and said he would cancel that Paris accord in which most nations pledged action against climate change.

In the U.S., a cornerstone of President Obama’s efforts against climate change are EPA rules forcing power plants to significantly lower emissions of carbon dioxide air pollution.

While the Trump administration would not be able to unilaterally cancel those regulations, an EPA chief with legal experience could weaken, delay or gradually dismantle them, The Times reported.

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Americans’ Life Expectancy Falls for 1st Time in Decades

Life expectancy for Americans declined last year, the first time that’s happened in more than two decades, according to a National Center for Health Statistics report released Thursday.

It said the decrease was due to rising rates of death for eight of the top 10 leading causes of death, including heart disease and stroke, diabetes, drug overdoses, and accidents, the Washington Post reported.

Life expectancy in the U.S. fell from 78.9 in 2014 to 78.8 in 2015. The last decline was in 1993, when it decreased from 75.6 to 75.4.

The overall death rate rose 1.2 percent last year, the first increase since 1999. In 2015, more than 2.7 million people died, and about 45 percent of those deaths were due to heart disease or cancer, the Post reported.

“This is unusual, and we don’t know what happened,” report lead author and epidemiologist Jiaquan Xu said. “So many leading causes of death increased.”

Some experts say the findings are cause for concern.

The report shows increases in “virtually every cause of death. It’s all ages,” David Weir, director of the health and retirement study, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, told the Post.

He pointed out that over the past five years, improvements in death rates were among the smallest of the past four decades. “There’s this just across-the-board [phenomenon] of not doing very well in the United States,” Weir said.

However, other experts advised against interpreting too much from one year of data, saying there could be a reversal next year, the Post reported.

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Astronaut, Senator John Glenn in Hospital

John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, has been in hospital for more than a week.

Glenn, 95, “is at The James Cancer Hospital at The Ohio State University (and) was admitted there more than a week ago,” university spokesman Hank Wilson wrote in an email, CNN reported.

“I do not know his condition or illness or prognosis. I caution that even though Sen. Glenn is at The James that does not necessarily mean he has cancer,” Wilson added.

Glenn, a former U.S. Senator, had heart valve replacement surgery in 2014, CNN reported.

He made his historic space flight in 1962.

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