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On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized limits on a carcinogenic gas called ethylene oxide that is used to sterilize most medical devices. Sterilizing facilities had polluted the air unchecked for decades, leading to disproportionately high cancer risks in surrounding communities. (Lawrence, 3/14)

All three of Ashley Gaignard’s children were born preterm and at low birth weights. It was a fact that Gaignard didn’t think about much at the time — her children are now in their twenties — because it felt so common among her friends and family. (Kutz, 3/14)

The emissions include particulate matter — microscopic particles that can penetrate deep into the lungs and cause irregular heartbeats, aggravate asthma and other respiratory ailments — which some scientists call the deadliest form of air pollution. A recent air quality analysis by Air Alliance Houston using industry emissions data submitted to the state found a higher annual average concentration of particulate matter the closer people live to the Ship Channel. The plants also spew cancer-causing chemicals like benzene that can irritate the throat and eyes when large amounts are inhaled. (Martinez and Perez, 3/14)

Legionnaire's disease (LD) cases rose ninefold between 2000 and 2018, and the reasons for the dramatic global rise have been a scientific mystery. This week, a research team proposed a surprising factor: a drop in air pollution. The study shedding new light on LD cases comes amid new data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showing that Legionella-related outbreaks were the leading cause of drinking water–related outbreaks from 2015 to 2020. (Schnirring, 3/14)

Senators want answers from the Biden administration on the recent cyberattack that froze millions of hospital and physician insurance claims. During a hearing Thursday, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) pressed Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to institute cybersecurity requirements for both hospitals and insurers and to “start holding these executives [accountable] who are not doing their job in line with the kind of safety standards Americans have the right to expect on cyber.” (Owermohle, 3/14)

Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra defended the FDA's review of cannabis science and its recommendation to loosen federal marijuana restrictions during a Thursday hearing on Capitol Hill. "There has been a lot of science that's been collected over the years on cannabis," Becerra said during the hearing before the Senate Finance Committee. "We have far more information now." (Fertig, 3/14)

Healthcare providers must ready themselves to comply with new standards for accommodating patients with disabilities. The Health and Human Services Department issued a proposed rule in September that would require providers to retrofit facilities and medical equipment to meet patients’ physical and sensory needs, ensure websites, mobile apps and virtual care programs are user-friendly for people with disabilities, and remove disability status as a factor in clinical support tools. The final rule could appear within weeks. (Hartnett, 3/14)

Roughly a dozen Biden administration health officials will mark “Match Day” for medical students on Friday, traveling to different medical schools across the country and speaking about President Biden’s health care agenda. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra will visit a medical school in Washington, D.C., while other officials will be at medical schools in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Nashville and other cities in Wisconsin, California and North Carolina. (Samuels, 3/14)

When the White House released President Biden’s 2025 budget requests this week, funding for biomedical research was stagnant. The more conservative wishlist from the president acknowledges a reduced appetite in Congress for non-defense government spending. (Cueto, 3/15)

Former President Trump in a new interview sought to clarify comments from earlier in the week in which he said there are ways to go about “cutting” entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. “I will never do anything that will jeopardize or hurt Social Security or Medicare,” Trump told Breitbart News on Wednesday. “We’ll have to do it elsewhere. But we’re not going to do anything to hurt them.” (Samuels, 3/14)

The president’s vigorous State of the Union address has partly reset the political narrative and is still delivering dividends. The prime-time look at Biden in his element, dominating the stage, offered a robust counter-image to the one Americans have sometimes seen – of a bewildered statesman who cited phone chats with dead European leaders and confused Mexico and Egypt in a news conference meant to fix the age issue. (Collinson, 3/13)

Top Biden administration officials went on the offensive at POLITICO’s 2024 Health Care Summit Wednesday in Washington, laying out the health care issues President Joe Biden will emphasize in his rematch with Donald Trump. Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra and Domestic Policy Adviser Neera Tanden said Biden would push to restore abortion rights, lower drug prices and bolster the Affordable Care Act. (Paun and Payne, 3/13)

�鶹Ů�� Health News' 'What The Health?' Podcast: Maybe It’s A Health Care Election After All

Health care wasn’t expected to be a major theme for this year’s elections. But as President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump secured their respective party nominations this week, the future of both Medicare and the Affordable Care Act appears to be up for debate. Meanwhile, the cyberattack of the UnitedHealth Group subsidiary Change Healthcare continues to do damage to the companies’ finances with no quick end in sight. (3/14)

Last year, Harry Abramson wrote President Biden a letter, asking him one big question: How did he overcome his stutter? According to Biden’s campaign, Harry, 9, wrote to the president for advice — saying that maybe, if he learned how to control his stutter, he, too, could one day be president. Biden, who regularly talks about his struggles with a stutter and the work he’s put into overcoming it, wrote back. And, on Wednesday, he met with Harry during a visit to Milwaukee to personally deliver some advice. (Alfaro, 3/14)

A symphony of synapses fires every time a songbird sings. For Erich Jarvis, a neurobiologist at Rockefeller University, the neural pathways he finds particularly interesting inside a birds’ brain are those that enable the bird to make new sounds from listening to their environment. (StFleur, 3/15)

A congressional effort to stiffen regulations on pharmacy benefit managers may not be dead after all. Senate Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and ranking member Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) aim to attach measures their panel has already approved to a spending bill Congress must pass by next Friday to avoid a partial government shutdown, they said at a Capitol Hill news conference Thursday. (McAuliff, 3/14)

Lawmakers say the next package of bills, which would fund the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS), State and Homeland Security (DHS) as well as foreign operations, will be a much heavier lift because of deep partisan divisions over President Biden’s immigration policy. Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) told The Hill on Tuesday that the DHS funding bill is “the most challenging one,” an assessment shared by other senators. (Bolton, 3/13)

The AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) has repeatedly gone after Gilead since 2021, accusing the company of taking “unlawful” actions to avoid offering its HIV drugs at a discount and highlighting an increase in the pay of CEO Daniel O'Day. In the latest attacks, AHF advocates protested outside two hotels in Miami where Andy Dickinson, chief financial officer at Gilead, and Kite executive Cindy Perettie were talking to analysts this week. (Taylor, 3/14)

Pharmaceutical maker Lilly added Amazon Pharmacy as the second online pharmacy option in its LillyDirect service, allowing patients to receive free delivery of certain diabetes, obesity and migraine medications. (Godt, 3/14)

German pharmaceutical company Bayer is expanding its U.S. pharma business significantly, despite corporate turmoil and pricing pressures that have led many in the drug industry to bemoan the potential end of the American biotech innovation boom. (DeAngelis, 3/15)

Active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) manufacturer Noramco has announced the launch of Noramco Group, a North American pharmaceutical supply chain services provider. It integrates the capabilities of two Noramco subsidiaries: drug product contract development and manufacturing organisation (CDMO) Halo Pharma, and Purisys. The strategic move aims to address the escalating drug shortages and quality concerns in the US by improving supply chain performance and increasing domestic production. (3/15)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: When Copay Assistance Backfires On Patients

In early 2019, Jennifer Hepworth and her husband were stunned by a large bill they unexpectedly received for their daughter’s prescription cystic fibrosis medication. Their payment had risen to $3,500 from the usual $30 for a month’s supply. That must be a mistake, she told the pharmacy. But it wasn’t. It turned out that the health insurance plan through her husband’s job had a new program in which it stopped applying any financial assistance they received from drugmakers to the family’s annual deductible. (Appleby, 3/15)

Teen pregnancy increases the chances that a young woman will drop out of school and struggle with poverty, research has shown. Teenagers are also more likely to develop serious medical complications during pregnancy. Now a large study in Canada reports another disturbing finding: Women who were pregnant as teenagers are more likely to die before their 31st birthday. The trend was observed among women who had carried teen pregnancies to term, as well as among those who had miscarried. (Rabin, 3/14)

A bill that would have made changes to Iowa’s fetal homicide law has been shelved after a Senate Republican joined Democrats in voicing concerns about the potential impact on in vitro fertilization after an Alabama court found frozen embryos can be considered children. The Senate declined to consider the bill, which was approved by the House last week. Iowa’s law currently outlines penalties for terminating or seriously injuring a “human pregnancy.” The bill would have changed that language to be about the death of, or serious injury to, an “unborn person” from fertilization to live birth. (Fingerhut, 3/14)

The Texas Medical Board will consider language to clarify what qualifies as a medical exception to the state’s abortion laws at an upcoming March 22 board meeting. The meeting agenda was published in the Texas Register Thursday morning. (Rubin, 3/14)

Vice President Kamala Harris arrived at the St. Paul facility Thursday afternoon, where she was greeted by Sarah Traxler, chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood North Central States, and embarked on a tour. She was joined on the tour by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) and Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.). (Vazquez, 3/14)

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla. has opposed an in vitro fertilization access bill for veterans saying that while he supports IVF, he doesn't support the bill's vague language and undefined cost. This comes after the Department of Veterans Affairs earlier this week announced it would soon expand its IVF care policy to include eligible veterans who are single or in same-sex marriages. (Frazier, 3/13)

Speaker Mike Johnson said Thursday that he does not believe Congress has a role to play when it comes to IVF legislation, as some members within the House Republican Conference have been pushing for in the wake of the controversial Alabama Supreme Court ruling. “It’s not my belief that Congress needs to play a role here,” the Louisiana Republican told reporters at the annual Republican issues conference held at The Greenbrier, a resort in West Virginia. “I think this is being handled by the states.” (Zanona and Talbot, 3/14)

Antiabortion lawmakers on Capitol Hill are facing a quiet pressure campaign by some of their most influential supporters to ramp up their defense that frozen embryos should legally be considered people and advocate for legislation that would codify a central driving force of antiabortion policies. (Alemany, 3/14)

Caitlyn Plaskett and her wife, Wanda, finally felt like they had to make a decision: keep paying high monthly storage fees to keep their five embryos frozen, or have them destroyed to save money. The couple used donor sperm to conceive their two sons, ages 3½ and 18 months. They were paying $65 per month to keep their remaining embryos stored — a cost, they said, that steadily rose each year by $10 to $15 per month. (Ferguson, 3/15)

Mary Dolan doesn’t live in Alabama. But she isn’t taking any chances. Dolan, 35, lives in Tennessee, just one state away, and watched as an Alabama court halted in vitro fertilization until lawmakers let it resume. (Luthra, 3/14)

Some 6.8% of American adults are currently experiencing long Covid symptoms, according to a new survey from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), revealing an “alarming” increase in recent months even as the health agency relaxes Covid isolation recommendations, experts say. That means an estimated 17.6 million Americans could now be living with long Covid. (Schreiber, 3/15)

Cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C), a rare but serious COVID-19 complication in children, have decreased from the earlier pandemic months but continue to be reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported today in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR). The CDC saw a relative increase in MIS-C cases in the fall of 2023, when the United States was experiencing a rise in COVID activity in the general population. (Schnirring, 3/14)

Jesse Ehrenfeld, an anesthesiologist at a Wisconsin hospital, asked a patient about to have heart surgery if she would consent to a blood transfusion should it become necessary. It's a standard question. But the patient refused. It was 2021, and the COVID-19 vaccine had become publicly available only a few months earlier. This patient, though, made it clear she did not want it – or blood from anyone who already had it. "It was at that moment I knew we were in for it," Ehrenfeld said. (Mueller, 3/15)

Hospitalized male COVID-19 patients younger than 75 who have a certain variant of a key anti-inflammatory gene are at much lower risk of experiencing severe inflammation and dying of the disease, New York University researchers reported yesterday in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. ... Men with rs419598 had significantly lower inflammatory biomarker concentrations and a lower death rate than those with another studied genotype (10.0% vs 17.8%). (Van Beusekom, 3/14)

Disease X may still be a hypothetical threat. But the risk from a new pathogen many times deadlier than COVID-19 is driving more spending decisions on rapid tests, antimicrobial drugs and other countermeasures. (Bettelheim, 3/15)

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved the first medicine developed specifically to treat the serious liver disease known as MASH. The pill, called Rezdiffra, is made by Madrigal Pharmaceuticals. (Feuerstein, 3/14)

Gilead Sciences will be able to quadruple production of its cell therapy cancer treatments by 2026 due to improvements in the U.S. biotech's manufacturing processes, an executive in charge of that business told Reuters. (Erman, 3/15)

Food and Drug Administration advisers Friday will weigh the risk of premature patient deaths from adverse events when they consider expanding the use of two CAR-T therapies for multiple myeloma. (Reed, 3/15)

The new sickle cell treatments have brought hope to those with the debilitating blood disorder, which is hereditary and disproportionately affects Black people. But the therapies come with a price tag of as much as $3 million for a course of treatment, which can take up to a year. Despite those high upfront costs, cell and gene therapies have the potential to reduce health care spending over time by addressing the underlying cause of the disease. (Hassanein, 3/14)

The increased interest in ibogaine arrives amid urgent efforts to ease the nation’s deadly addiction crisis and comes as companies race to develop psychedelics to treat mental health ailments. In Ohio, a prominent ibogaine advocate in February partnered with a nonprofit that supports people with addiction and called for using state opioid-settlement money to study the drug. It mirrors a much-publicized plan in Kentucky that sought to allocate up to $42 million in settlement money for research, an effort that fizzled amid shifting politics. (Ovalle and Gilbert, 3/14)

Anew study suggests the antiviral drug obeldesivir may be effective in curing Ebola Sudan infections, for which there are currently no approved vaccines or treatments. (Branswell, 3/14)

Anyone who attended the Disney On Ice performance on March 8 may have been exposed to measles, the Cincinnati Health Department announced. The CHD said it has been notified of a measles exposure at Heritage Bank Center during the show. People who attended or were in the building up to two hours after the 7 p.m. show ended may have been exposed. (Weiter, 3/14)

An unvaccinated Central Valley child has a confirmed case of measles, health officials say. Stanislaus County Public Health announced the confirmed case on Thursday. The child had recently traveled out the country, but health officials didn't reveal exactly where. While relatively rare in the US, confirmed cases are often traced back to other parts of the world where measles is still present. Officials noted that all known public exposures related to this new case have occurred in healthcare settings. (Padilla, 3/14)

Although morels are generally considered safe, the mushrooms were at the heart of a deadly illness outbreak in Montana last year. An investigation from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, detailed in a report published Thursday, tried to solve the mystery about exactly what went wrong. (Christensen, 3/14)

"Killer fungus" may sound like science fiction, but fungal infections kill an estimated 1.7 million people worldwide per year -- more than tuberculosis or malaria. Now, driven by climate change, population growth, and drug resistance, the danger is growing, reinforced by new warnings from the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Salzman, Aronson, and Wetsman, 3/14)

Global tuberculosis (TB) incidence, mortality, and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) have decreased significantly in adolescents and young adults since 1990, but the incidence of drug-resistant TB increased, Chinese researchers reported today in Pediatrics. Using data from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019, researchers from Peking University and Tsinghua University calculated the percentage of relative changes in TB incidence, deaths, and DALYs in people aged 10 to 24 from 1990 to 2019. (Dall, 3/14)

Lurie Children’s Hospital has started to reactivate its MyChart online patient portal, more than a month after falling victim to a cyberattack. Lurie plans to bring back MyChart over the coming days, the health system said in a statement. Patients will soon be able to use MyChart again for online scheduling, e-check-in, to send messages to providers, to request medication refills and to pay bills, Lurie said. (Schencker, 3/14)

University of Chicago Medical Center must pay $14 million to the estate of a boy who died several years after he was born with severe brain damage at the hospital, a Cook County jury decided. (Schencker, 3/14)

Mass General Brigham is planning to merge the clinical departments and academic programs at two major medical centers in the next few years. Comparable departments at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital will become one department, each led by a chairperson, Boston-based Mass General Brigham said Wednesday. (Hudson, 3/14)

Pi Health, a startup that deploys artificial intelligence in the field of cancer treatment trials, raised more than $30 million in funding to further develop its technology and tie new partnerships. AlleyCorp and Obvious Ventures led the Series A round, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup said Thursday. The funding will launch Pi Health as an independent company, three years after it was incubated as a subsidiary of Nasdaq-listed BeiGene Ltd. (Rai, 3/14)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: How Your In-Network Health Coverage Can Vanish Before You Know It

Sarah Feldman, 35, received the first ominous letters from Mount Sinai Medical last November. The New York hospital system warned it was having trouble negotiating a pricing agreement with UnitedHealthcare, which includes Oxford Health Plans, Feldman’s insurer. “We are working in good faith with Oxford to reach a new fair agreement,” the letter said, continuing reassuringly: “Your physicians will remain in-network and you should keep appointments with your providers.” (Rosenthal, 3/15)

James Crumbley, whose teenage son killed four students in the 2021 Oxford High School shooting, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter by an Oakland County jury Thursday in a verdict that caps two separate trials that made Crumbley and his wife the first parents of a school shooter to face homicide-level charges for their child’s crime. The jury of six men and six women deliberated for nearly 11 hours before finding Crumbley, 47, guilty of all four involuntary manslaughter counts. The verdict concluded the brisk eight-day trial that largely lacked the drama and hostility between the defense and prosecutors seen in Jennifer Crumbley’s trial, which ended last month with her conviction on four counts of involuntary manslaughter. (Bellware, 3/14)

Here is a look at other cases in which parents have been found criminally liable after a shooting by their child. (Hassan, 3/14)

Just about every state in America has cracked down on fentanyl distribution, by stepping up arrests and increasing prison sentences. But few places are as aggressive as Riverside County, Calif., in prosecuting people who supply fatal doses of fentanyl. Since late 2021, the Riverside County district attorney, Mike Hestrin, has charged 34 suspected fentanyl suppliers with murder and is said to be the first prosecutor in California to achieve a guilty verdict from a jury in a fentanyl-related homicide trial. (Corkery, 3/14)

Authorities released body-camera footage Wednesday showing the lead-up to deputies shooting and killing a 15-year-old boy with autism who was charging at a deputy with a large gardening tool, in a case that has sparked outrage. Two deputies shot Ryan Gainer in front of his Apple Valley, Calif., home after the teen came at a deputy with a raised hula hoe — a tool with a metal head used to remove weeds — on Saturday afternoon, San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus said Wednesday during a news conference. (Brasch, 3/14)

The state Senate and Assembly proposed record-high Medicaid rate increases in their one-house budget bills this week, rebuffing Gov. Kathy Hochul’s efforts to tamp down the program’s ballooning cost in the upcoming fiscal year. Both houses called for a 3 percent rate increase and supplementary hikes for hospitals, nursing homes and assisted living facilities. (Kaufman, 3/14)

Schools are already required to notify parents two weeks before teaching sex education, so families can opt out. But a new Republican-backed proposal passed by the New Hampshire House in a 186 to 185 vote Thursday would expand that notification requirement to allow families to opt out of instruction on sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, and gender expression as well. The move, which drew condemnation from Democrats, comes amid a heightened national focus on schools, teachers, and gender. (Gokee, 3/14)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: A New Orleans Neighborhood Confronts The Racist Legacy Of A Toxic Stretch Of Highway

Aside from a few discarded hypodermic needles on the ground, the Hunter’s Field Playground in New Orleans looks almost untouched. It’s been open more than nine years, but the brightly painted red and yellow slides and monkey bars are still sleek and shiny, and the padded rubber tiles feel springy underfoot. For people who live nearby, it’s no mystery why the equipment is in relatively pristine shape: Children don’t come here to play. (Hawkins, 3/15)

The morning of February 4, 2007, started off like any other for 25-year-old Lashanda Salinas. She got up and made the 20-minute commute to her job as a front desk clerk at a Nashville hotel where she greeted guests and checked them in. Hours later, her life changed. Salinas was speaking with a customer when two police officers walked into the hotel lobby. (Norwood, 3/12)

For more than five years, Helen Cruz lived on the streets of Grants Pass. A small, rural town of roughly 40,000 people, the city has now found itself at the center of a homeless crisis plaguing major cities across the U.S. “We’re in this situation not because we want to be. We’re in this situation because we don’t have a choice right now,” Cruz, 49, said in an interview. For years, Grants Pass has been embroiled in a contentious lawsuit with homeless residents like Cruz, who argue that anti-camping ordinances enacted by the city — including fines for sleeping in any park or public space — violate their constitutional rights. (Kreutz and Keyes, 3/12)

The three 6-year-old girls stood on the sidelines as their coach swabbed their hands. Then they ran onto a lush green turf field and played soccer for 90 minutes straight — no stepping off the pitch. This wasn’t just a practice. It was part of a small experiment conducted in the suburban foothills of San Diego last summer. Salar Parvini, 44, the children’s assistant soccer coach, swabbed his hands too, and shipped the samples taken before and after the practice to a lab in Lancaster, Pa. There, scientists would test them for “forever chemicals,” also known as PFAS, a broad class of man-made chemicals linked with a variety of health concerns, from high cholesterol to cancer. (Amenabar, 3/12)

For years, people who had polycystic ovary syndrome and were also overweight were told that their symptoms would improve if they lost weight via a restrictive diet. In 2018, a leading group of PCOS experts recommended that overweight or obese women with the hormonal disorder consider reducing their caloric intake by up to 750 calories a day. That guidance helped to spawn questionable diet programs on social media, and reinforced an impression among people with PCOS that if only they could successfully alter their diets, they would feel better. But the recommendations were not based on robust PCOS studies, and researchers now say that there is no solid evidence to suggest that a restrictive diet in the long-term has any significant impact on PCOS symptoms. (Gupta, 3/11)

To keep himself healthy into his eighth decade, David Sandler recently decided to go beyond his regular workouts and try something experimental: taking rapamycin, an unproven but increasingly popular drug to promote longevity. The medication has gained a large following thanks to longevity researchers and celebrity doctors who, citing animal studies, contend that rapamycin could be a game changer in the quest to fend off age-related diseases. The drug is going mainstream as an anti-aging treatment, even though rapamycin’s regulatory approval is for treating transplant patients. There is no evidence that it can extend human life. (Gilbert, 3/15)

As if to prove that every rule has an exception, the usually dysfunctional Republican-majority House of Representatives has at least one sensible piece of bipartisan legislation on its record: In December it passed a health-care measure called the Lower Costs, More Transparency Act on a 320-71 vote. (3/14)

Dr. Sarah Traxler, chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood North Central States, said her St. Paul, Minnesota clinic has seen a 25% increase in patients seeking abortion services since Roe was overturned. (Patricia Lopez, 3/15)

My life changed on March 17, 2021. I went to bed completely unaware of how badly I could be impacted, as a healthy person, by COVID-19, and woke up to the start of a chronic illness that has profoundly altered my life. (Rachel Beale, 3/15)

Memories of our medical school years at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine still linger – lifelong friends, memorable professors, caring for sick patients across the Bronx. And finally, a decade removed from graduation, our monthly student loan payments. (Dr. Jessica Faiz and Dr. Utibe R. Essien, 3/15)

Scientists are taught early in our training that criticism is a fundamental part of the job. What we are not usually trained to navigate, however, is public backlash, which is exactly what followed the publication of the comprehensive genomic sequencing results from the All of Us Research Program. (Thiago Arzua, 3/15)