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�鶹Ů�� HEALTH NEWS ORIGINAL STORIES

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Your New Therapist: Chatty, Leaky, And Hardly Human
Vince Lahey of Carefree, Arizona, embraces chatbots. From Big Tech products to “shady” ones, they offer “someone that I could share more secrets with than my therapist.” He especially likes the apps for feedback and support, even though sometimes they berate him or lead him to fight with his ex-wife. “I feel more inclined to share more,” Lahey said. “I don’t care about their perception of me.” There are a lot of people like Lahey. (Tahir, 4/17)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Listen: With Little Federal Regulation, States Are Left To Shape The Rules On AI In Health Care
Speed, efficiency, and lower costs. Those are the traits artificial intelligence supporters celebrate. But the same qualities worry physicians who fear the technology could lead to insurance denials with humans left out of the loop. With scant federal regulation, states are left to shape the rules on AI in health care. For residents in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, a divide is playing out on opposite sides of the Potomac River. Maryland and Virginia have taken very different approaches to regulating AI in health insurance. (Sausser, 4/17)

VACCINES

In a sharp break with his past rhetoric, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. offered a qualified embrace of the measles vaccine on Thursday, as President Trump named a new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention whose views on vaccination are more conventional than Mr. Kennedy’s. (Gay Stolberg and Blum, 4/16)

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Thursday that he was reforming an influential task force that determines which preventive medical screenings, procedures and medications insurance companies must cover at no cost for millions of Americans. Speaking at a congressional hearing, Mr. Kennedy accused the panel, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, of having been “lackadaisical and negligent for 20 years.” He said he would appoint new members with “a clear mission,” which he did not elaborate on. (Astor and Blum, 4/16)

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Thursday kicked off what will be a marathon of congressional hearings over the next week, facing lawmakers’ questions for the first time since last fall. The first two of what will be seven hearings across Capitol Hill took place Thursday. Kennedy’s first stop was the House Ways & Means Committee where he was appearing for the first time. He then testified in front of the House Appropriations Committee. (Kopan, 4/16)

CDC LEADERSHIP

President Trump nominated Erica Schwartz on Thursday to be director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tapping a former public health leader for a position that has been filled mostly on a part-time or interim basis during the second Trump administration. (Branswell and Cirruzzo, 4/16)

MORE ON THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION

The Department of Health and Human Services reversed a staffing reduction at a health program that provides vital medical care for 9/11 heroes after New York lawmakers bemoaned the cuts. Officials in the CDC, a subagency of HHS, informed Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) this week that the World Trade Center Health Program had gotten approval to hire 37 more employees to reach a goal of 120 full-time workers, following inquiries from her and Sen. Chuck Schumer’s office. (Christenson, 4/15)

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said his deals with drugmakers would bring down prescription drug prices in the U.S. But a report released by Senate Democrats finds prices have continued to climb — in some cases, sharply. The report — released Thursday by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the ranking member on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, ahead of a hearing focused on drug prices — found that companies that signed drug pricing deals with Trump have raised the cost of hundreds of medications and launched new ones at an average price of $353,000 a year. (Lovelace Jr., 4/16)

A psychedelic used in some countries to treat post-traumatic stress disorder is expected to get a closer examination from the federal government on its safety and effectiveness, sources told CBS News. The White House is drafting an executive order that would signal the Trump administration's willingness to further U.S. research into a drug called ibogaine. (Jacobs and Gounder, 4/16)

A Venezuelan man pleaded his case to asylum officials on Thursday in an interview that his wife, a well-known doctor in South Texas, planned to attend until she was detained at the airport with the couple’s 5-year-old daughter. Milenko Faria was interviewed at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services offices near Los Angeles, while his wife, Dr. Rubeliz Bolivar, entered her sixth day in immigration custody in Texas and was unable to attend the appointment they had been waiting for for more than 10 years. (Salomon, 4/17)

GUN VIOLENCE EPIDEMIC

A man carrying a backpack with an AR-style pistol inside was arrested Thursday after walking into health insurer Aetna’s headquarters in Connecticut, police said. Security guards detained the man without incident shortly after 10 a.m., within 3 minutes after he entered the Hartford building. They held him until city police officers arrived, a spokesperson for Hartford police said. It wasn’t immediately clear what the man’s plans were, Lt. Aaron Boisvert said. (Roubein and Weber, 4/16)

HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY

Nationwide, hospitals and other providers are leaving private Medicare Advantage plans, putting thousands of seniors at risk of higher costs and of losing trusted doctors. (Jaffe, 4/16)

Hospital-at-home programs are gaining steam again as health systems make investments and press for a permanent payment solution for the care model. Penn Medicine, Cleveland Clinic and Tampa General Hospital are among the health systems that launched or expanded in-home acute care programs in the past few weeks — encouraged by the extension of the Acute Hospital Care at Home wavier through September 2030. (Eastabrook, 4/16)

A judge has cleared the way for a trial over a class action lawsuit claiming the operator of Alden nursing homes in the Chicago area systematically understaffed its facilities to make more money, increasing the safety risks of its patients. (McCoppin, 4/16)

A proposed collaboration between Mass General Brigham and CVS to increase primary care access could raise commercial health care spending by more than $40 million annually within three years, according to a preliminary state report released Thursday. That cost estimate, published by the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission, would add to already ballooning health care spending in the Commonwealth. (Wolf, 4/16)

Insurers hoping for a reprieve from an out-of-network billing system largely favoring healthcare providers will likely be left wanting as federal policymakers sit on their hands and one large payer’s bid to limit the claims faces an uphill battle, strategy firm Capstone concluded in a new report. A quarter-by-quarter rise in total payment dispute volumes is likely to continue due to the structural incentives for providers to engage in the process, the firm’s analysts wrote in its report. Such a trend would be slightly positive for hospitals, solidly beneficial for specialty providers and a roadblock for payers—“however, employers could face an additional burden,” they said. (Muoio, 4/16)

Arbitration decisions, it turns out, are like cockroaches. They’re very hard to kill. It’s a long held truism in the legal world, and it was underscored this week when a federal judge shot down a health insurer’s lawsuit challenging No Surprises Act arbitration decisions. (Bannow, 4/16)

ORGAN TRANSPLANTS

Immune tolerance has long been the holy grail in transplant medicine, a hoped-for end to the downsides of anti-rejection regimens for patients after they receive lifesaving organ transplants. A small, early-stage study now shows promise in taking cells from living donors — people giving a portion of their livers — to teach recipients’ immune systems to accept the foreign organs as their own and achieve the ultimate healthy outcome. (Cooney, 4/17)

Black Americans are disproportionately represented on the national organ donation transplant waitlist compared to people of other races or ethnicities, according to data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Available data show that in 2025, Black or African American patients accounted for about 27% of people on the national transplant waiting list, or 28,000 people, while they represented roughly 14% of the U.S. population. (David, 4/16)

PHARMACEUTICALS

A new analysis from US Pharmacopeia (USP) suggests that vulnerabilities in the pharmaceutical supply chain could put dozens of widely used medicines at risk of shortage, even when current supplies appear stable. (Bergeson, 4/16)

A California company has recalled more than 3.1 million bottles of lubricating eye drops because it had not properly tested – and thus could not prove – whether the products were sterile. These products are sold under several names at major retailers across the country. The company, K.C. Pharmaceuticals, initiated the recall on March 3, 2026. (White, 4/15)

A systematic review suggested that drugs targeting amyloid beta appeared to have no clinically meaningful positive effects, sparking swift backlash from Alzheimer's disease experts. (George, 4/16)

Eli Lilly & Co. said its new weight-loss pill Foundayo was at least as good as an older insulin at warding off heart attacks, strokes or other major cardiovascular events in a study, a finding that comes after US regulators asked for more safety data. The late-stage trial compared Foundayo to Lilly’s insulin, following patients over the course of about two years. Its main objective was to assess the new pill’s ability to prevent cardiovascular emergencies in people who were at increased risk and had both diabetes and obesity. (Muller and Kresge, 4/16)

The scientists whose work spurred the development of powerful obesity drugs like Eli Lilly’s Zepbound are now raising a provocative hypothesis: Perhaps targeting the GLP-1 hormone is actually not necessary to achieve effective weight loss. (Chen, 4/16)

A recent analysis of more than 400,000 Reddit posts has found some lesser-known side effects of GLP-1 drugs taken for weight loss and diabetes. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania used AI to analyze more than five years of posts from nearly 70,000 Reddit users, according to a report published in Medical Xpress. Gastrointestinal issues, including nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and headaches, are commonly reported side effects of GLP-1s, according to the Mayo Clinic. (Kaplan, 4/16)

Novo Nordisk A/S has hired about 2,000 people this year, reshaping its workforce after laying off about 10% of staff in 2025.The figure reflects successful job offers, and about 1,400 of those workers have already started, a company spokeswoman said. Of those new hires, Novo said 398 have been in its home country of Denmark. (Kresge, 4/16)

OpenAI is rolling out an early version of an artificial intelligence model meant to speed up drug discoveries, joining a field of growing interest for tech companies eager to prove AI can pave the way for more scientific breakthroughs. The ChatGPT maker said Thursday that the model, GPT-Rosalind, is intended for life sciences research, such as helping glean insights from large volumes of data and turning scientific studies into health-care applications for patients. The model will be available initially as a research preview to some of the company’s business customers, OpenAI said. The initial users include drugmaker Amgen Inc., vaccine maker Moderna Inc. and the Allen Institute, a bioscience research nonprofit. (Metz, 4/16)

OUTBREAKS AND HEALTH THREATS

San Francisco public health officials on Wednesday confirmed the city’s first case of clade I mpox, a strain of the virus that officials say may cause more severe illness than the type behind the outbreak in 2022. The case was identified in an unvaccinated San Francisco adult who was hospitalized and is now improving, according to the San Francisco Department of Public Health. The person reported close contact with someone who had traveled internationally, the agency said. (Vaziri, 4/16)

Since the introduction of Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) conjugate vaccines in the United States in 1987, invasive outbreaks of Hib have become rare, but a report in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published today describes two recent clusters among homeless adults who would not have been eligible for vaccination. (Soucheray, 4/16)

US adults diagnosed as having late-stage syphilis are at higher risk for major cardiovascular conditions such as stroke and heart attack, as well as death, than those without the infection, per a study published this week in JAMA Network Open. (Van Beusekom, 4/16)

Only some post-acute conditions often attributed to long COVID truly occur more often after SARS-CoV-2 infection than after other viral respiratory diseases, according to a non–peer-reviewed meta-analysis published this week on the preprint server medRxiv. (Van Beusekom, 4/16)

Inspection Service (APHIS) reported new detections of H5N1 avian flu, with positive tests revealing the virus in five Idaho dairy herds. The milking cows were the first avian flu detections in cattle since a Wisconsin report in December 2025. The new detection comes almost exactly two years since US officials first recorded avian influenza in dairy cattle. (Soucheray, 4/16)

STATE WATCH

New Hampshire lawmakers may drop plans to prohibit all vaccine clinics at public schools. State senators passed legislation Thursday that would allow flu vaccine clinics to continue during the school day and permit clinics during a public health emergency. But funding those clinics may be a hurdle. (Timmins, 4/16)

Louisiana residents living near industrial areas are at a greater risk of experiencing learning disabilities, anemia miscarriage and many other health conditions according to a new research study based on data from Medicaid claims made in the state. The Collaborative Data Analysis (CoDA) research team — which included researchers from Dillard University, Virginia Tech and the University of California San Francisco — looked into the negative health impacts of residential exposure to industrial pollution using data from Louisiana Medicaid claims from 2017 to 2019. (Yehiya, 4/16)

Since 2018, more than 100 billion gallons (378 billion liters) of raw sewage laden with industrial chemicals and trash have poured into the Tijuana River, according to the International Boundary and Water Commission. The river traverses land where three generations of the Egger family once raised dairy cows. The United States and Mexico signed an agreement last year to clean up the longstanding problem by upgrading wastewater plants to keep up with Tijuana’s population growth and industrial waste from factories, many owned by U.S. companies. (Watson and Pineda, 4/17)

California gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra surged in the first poll following the abrupt departure of former Democratic front-runner Eric Swalwell. Becerra, who served as US secretary of health and human services in the Biden administration, now has 10% voter support, up from just 3% last month, according to an Emerson College survey released Thursday. (Clanton, 4/16)

Tiger Woods’ attorney is challenging Florida prosecutors seeking a subpoena for the golfer’s prescription medications from a pharmacy, according to court records filed in Martin County (Fla.) Circuit Court on Tuesday. (Powell, 4/16)