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Last spring at a small Alabama hospital, a team of transplant surgeons prepared to cut into Misty Hawkins. The clock was ticking. Her organs wouldn’t be usable for much longer. Days earlier, she had been a vibrant 42-year-old with a playful sense of humor and a love for the Thunder Beach Motorcycle Rally. But after Ms. Hawkins choked while eating and fell into a coma, her mother decided to take her off life support and donate her organs. She was removed from a ventilator and, after 103 minutes, declared dead. (Rosenthal and Tate, 7/20)

If there is a small red heart with the words “organ donor” at the bottom of your driver’s license, that puts you in a group of over 173 million Americans who are in the national organ donor registry. Organ donation has wide public support, but medical ethicists say there is still confusion about what it looks like and how it affects patients and families. (Webster-Bass, 7/20)

Though COVID-19 activity in the United States is still low, infections are on the rise in some parts of the country, including states in the Southeast, South, and West, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today in its latest respiratory virus updates. The upward trend is reflected mainly in early indicators, including emergency department visits for COVID, which are still very low nationally, at 0.5%. Visits were up 10.9% from the week before, with greater increases in children ages 4 years old and younger. (Schnirring, 7/18)

Though H5N1 avian flu outbreaks in dairy cattle and commercial poultry are at low levels in the United States, scientists continue to sort out how the virus spreads on farms, and two new pieces of information this week shed more light on potential spread in dairy cattle: contamination from house flies and “milk snatching”. Over the last 30 days, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has reported only one detection in poultry, a game bird farm in Pennsylvania, and two detections in dairy cattle, which involved herds from California and Arizona. (Schnirring, 7/18)

An Oregon man contracted plague from his pet cat in January last year—by far the earliest case ever recorded in a calendar year in the state—possibly indicating a seasonal shift of the disease in people. The man's case was detailed yesterday in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, is most commonly confirmed in people in late spring or summer. It typically spreads through fleas from rodents. Oregon had not confirmed a human plague case since 2015, when it recorded two. (Wappes, 7/18)

Dexcom has recalled 19 models of its Dexcom G6, G7, One and One+ glucose monitoring receivers. The speakers may fail to sound an alert when a patient’s blood sugar reaches dangerously low or high levels, which could lead to seizures, vomiting, loss of consciousness or death. The Food and Drug Administration has reported 56 injuries and no deaths linked to this recall, according to a notice issued Thursday. The agency classified the recall as Class I, its most serious category. (Dubinsky, 7/18)

Kayem Foods Inc. is recalling over 24,000 pounds of ready-to-eat chicken sausage products that may be contaminated with pieces of plastic, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service said Thursday. The company reported to FSIS that it had received three consumer complaints reporting white plastic pieces in the food products. There have been no reports of injuries linked to the plastic pieces, according to FSIS' announcement. (Breen, 7/19) 

David Gomez, a school resource officer for the Boise County Sheriff’s Office in Idaho, started noticing caffeine pouches last spring. Students were using the pillow-shaped pouches, which can contain more than 200 milligrams of caffeine, alongside nicotine pouches like Zyn. They’ll use them either as a disguise for nicotine pouch usage — caffeine and nicotine pouches often look virtually identical — or a complement to it, Gomez said. (Ducharme, 7/20)

Emiliano Slesaransky, 17, joined Santa Monica High School's football team as a freshman and — at the urging of coaches and teammates— started hitting the gym whenever possible: in the morning, after school, and on the weekends. The people he met there would share their strategies for bulking up. "They would take protein powders, other supplements like some people I know take ashwagandha, and maybe creatine," he says, citing popular energy and exercise-enhancing supplements. Emiliano started taking some of them, too. (Noguchi, 7/21)

Parents should avoid preteens’ use of smartphones and social media, according to new research. A study released Monday found that using smartphones before age 13 could damage kids’ mental health. (Alaimo, 7/20)

A long-practiced food processing method has been up for debate in recent years, with some opting to drink and eat without sterilizing it first. The polarizing process is pasteurization — a heating process that kills the microbes behind common foodborne illnesses. ... By getting rid of harmful microbes, pasteurization can prevent foodborne illnesses like listeriosis, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diphtheria, Q fever, and brucellosis, according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Pasteurization can also change the nutritional value, flavor and appearance of food, though only minimally, per the National Library of Medicine. (Kutz, 7/19)