President-elect Donald Trump’s new health policy adviser, Katy Talento, tried to kill funding for HIV/AIDS research by claiming the money was going to support Russian prostitution, and she has suggested women can avoid the Zika virus by having their husbands sleep on top of the covers at night.

Former Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat who fought efforts by conservatives to eliminate AIDS research funding during the George W. Bush administration, told BuzzFeed News, “This appointment raises a lot of alarm bells.”

“This is a key position in the White House for health policy,” Waxman said, adding that he is concerned Talento may represent a new push against contraception and efforts to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS.

“I hope this administration is not going to roll back the clock … on what we can do to prevent sexually transmitted diseases,” Waxman said.

Talento has a master's of science degree from Harvard University, and according to the Trump transition team’s press release on her appointment, she has “worked in the field on disease control programs in the U.S. and in Africa.” A biography posted at the Leadership Institute, where Talento serves as a volunteer faculty member, says she has also focused on “HIV prevention among injection drug users in the U.S. and Russia.” Talento is also a veteran Senate staffer who has worked on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, as well as for Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican.

The announcement was met with alarm from women’s health groups, who have taken issue with Talento’s belief that oral contraceptives can cause abortion, despite a clear consensus among researchers that they do not.

Talento’s recommendations for avoiding the Zika virus, blamed for severe birth defects in infants, have also raised eyebrows. In January she published a list of tips for avoiding the virus. While many of the recommendations are fairly standard — avoiding areas where mosquitos breed and using bug repellent, for instance — they also suggest that women “sleep with your husband, with you snug under the covers and him on top of the covers, offering himself as human sacrifice to the mosquitos, who will pick the easier target.”

There appears to be no basis for the notion that this would protect pregnant women. “I don’t know where she’s getting her data from,” said Dr. Nikos Vasilakis, a Zika expert at the University of Texas.

And given that the Zika virus can be transmitted through sex, it’s unclear how sacrificing the husband to biting mosquitos would protect women from contracting it.

But it is Talento’s historic hostility toward HIV/AIDS research funding that has caused broader concerns for scientists and is “raising fears that their research may be losing funding,” Waxman said.

Talento’s opposition to HIV/AIDS research funding dates to at least 2003 when, as a professional staff member of the Senate health committee, she was part of an effort to defund more than 150 research grants.

The so-called “blacklist” of grants ranged from education programs to studies of transmission rates among sex workers and intravenous drug users. Backed by the Traditional Values Coalition, House lawmakers drafted legislation to end the more than $100 million in National Institutes of Health grants that supported the programs.