�鶹Ů��

The injury is similar to a condition called “welder’s flash,” which affects welders who are exposed to bright light from a welding torch, or to damage suffered by those who open their eyes without goggles in a tanning bed. An eclipse-related injury to the retina wouldn’t hurt, said Sarah Zambotti, an optometrist with Allegheny Health Network, and symptoms likely wouldn’t appear for 30 minutes to even a whole day after exposure. (Sostek, 4/8)

A total solar eclipse isn’t the kind of thing where you can just wing it. You have to wear eclipse glasses at all times when any part of the sun is visible. But there is an exception: Do not wear eclipse glasses during the brief period of “totality,” when the sun’s face is completely blocked by the moon, leaving only the glowing solar corona. (Achenbach, 4/5)

Hospitals in the path of Monday's solar eclipse started planning more than a year ago to limit disruptions to their operations while also serving up a little fun for employees and patients. ... Healthcare facilities in the path of totality have been working on ways to guarantee the continuation of emergency transportation and acute care services as communities anticipate the arrival of millions of tourists. (Devereaux and DeSilva, 4/5)

To hear Herodotus tell it, a total solar eclipse in 585 BC ended a five-year war between ancient kingdoms in present-day Turkey. Could another total eclipse on Monday bring an end to the partisan wars in America?The idea may sound far-fetched — until you talk with Paul Piff. The UC Irvine professor of psychology and social behavior has spent the better part of two decades researching what triggers us to set our personal needs aside and shift our focus to the greater good. (Kaplan, 4/7)

Former president Donald Trump, who has wavered between highlighting and downplaying his role in curtailing abortion rights, suggested Monday that the politically volatile issue should be left to states, after months of mixed signals about his position. In a video posted on social media, Trump took credit for the overturning of Roe v. Wade but rebuffed pressure to campaign on a national limit. It is “now up to the states to do the right thing,” he said. “My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land. In this case, the law of the state,” Trump said in the video. (Knowles and LeVine, 4/8)

Republican Senate candidate Eric Hovde, who is looking to unseat Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), told reporters Thursday that women should have a “right to make a choice” early in pregnancy — a departure from a previous, more hard line position on abortion. (Alfaro, 4/5)

Pro-choice advocacy groups in Michigan want to repeal parental consent to obtain an abortion via a new report. Since 1993, Michigan law stipulates that citizens under 18 years old must have parental consent for an abortion. ... "This law is actually of no benefit to the vast majority of young people who do involve their parent in the decision. And for the small number who can't, it can be deeply, deeply harmful," Jo Becker, who serves as advocacy director for the children's rights division at Human Rights Watch, told the Detroit Free Press. (Nelson, 4/7)

Abortion rights supporters have been on a hot winning streak in state ballot initiatives since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. Now here comes Florida. The Florida Supreme Court issued a pair of decisions earlier this week that upheld a strict abortion ban in the state and also cleared the way for Amendment 4, a November referendum on whether to enshrine the right to abortion in the Florida Constitution. (Lizza, 4/6)

When the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in March about restricting access to the abortion drug mifepristone, Elisa Wells, co-founder and co-director of Plan C, was ready. Plan C, an information resource that connects women to abortion pill providers, almost immediately saw a spike in searches for the medication. With Florida’s Supreme Court paving the way for the state’s six-week abortion ban, Wells says she’s expecting even more search activity and more creative thinking from providers. (Brooks and Burns, 4/7)

A little more than 10 years ago, Rebecca Nall chose to have an abortion. Not long out of college and living in her native Texas, she found herself pregnant when she didn’t want to be. She reached out to her local Planned Parenthood, but the location didn’t offer the service. That set off a confusing, stressful, and seemingly endless series of Google searches and calls to try and find a nearby, affordable care provider. The experience was taxing even with the support of a partner and friends. (DiFeliciantonio, 4/7)

For decades, the Food and Drug Administration’s accelerated approval pathway has helped companies get drugs for serious unmet medical needs to patients — and the market — sooner. But about half of cancer drugs approved via this route fail to improve patient survival or quality of life in subsequent clinical trials after more than five years of follow-up, according to new findings presented Sunday at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting. The data come from an analysis of cancer drugs granted accelerated approval over the past decade. In some cases, failure to show clinical benefit didn’t stop the FDA from converting accelerated approvals into full approvals, and the authors note the agency’s conversion decisions have increasingly been based on less stringent evidence of a drug’s benefits. (Wosen, 4/7)

Researchers looking for clues about why some types of cancer are on the rise in younger adults say they’ve found an interesting lead: a connection to accelerated biological aging. Aging is the major risk for many types of cancer, meaning the older you get, the more likely you are to be diagnosed. And increasingly, experts recognize that age is more than just the number of candles on a birthday cake. It’s also the wear and tear on the body, caused by lifestyle, stress and genetics, which is sometimes referred to as a person’s biological age. (Goodman, 4/7)

Ice could be the next frontier in breast cancer therapy, according to new research from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. In breast cancer patients, cold therapy was shown to be effective in freezing and destroying small, cancerous tumors in a study presented at the Society of Interventional Radiology Annual Scientific Meeting in Salt Lake City last week. Cryoablation, a minimally invasive technique, could provide a treatment alternative for patients who are not candidates for surgery, a press release stated. (Rudy, 4/5)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has allowed cell therapies of Johnson & Johnson and Bristol Myers Squibb to be used for treating patients in the earlier stages of a type of blood cancer, the companies said on Friday. Both J&J and Bristol Myers' therapies helped extend the time that patients lived without disease progression in late stage studies — more than when patients received 'standard of care' treatments, the companies said in separate statements. (K and Satija, 4/6)

Federal advisers on nuclear medicine safety had conflicts of interest when they evaluated whether accidental injections of radioactive drugs used in medical imaging should be reported to authorities, according to a watchdog report. Why it matters: The special inquiry found the Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn't have a policy requiring conflict-of-interest reviews and therefore lacks controls to ensure compliance with federal ethics guidelines. (Bettelheim, 4/8)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Ten Doctors On FDA Panel Reviewing Abbott Heart Device Had Financial Ties With Company

When the FDA recently convened a committee of advisers to assess a cardiac device made by Abbott, the agency didn’t disclose that most of them had received payments from the company or conducted research it had funded — information readily available in a federal database. One member of the FDA advisory committee was linked to hundreds of payments from Abbott totaling almost $200,000, according to a database maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services. (Hilzenrath and Hacker, 4/8)

A controversial heart pump from Abiomed reduced the number of deaths in severe heart attack patients, according to a highly anticipated randomized trial presented at the American College of Cardiology conference and published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Sunday. The trial, which took 10 years to enroll, followed 355 patients for 180 days in Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom who came into the hospital with a heart attack and dangerously low blood flow, known as cardiogenic shock. (Lawrence, 4/7)

Beta blockers are a mainstay in cardiovascular treatment, frequently given to patients after heart attacks. But a new large trial turns that convention on its head, suggesting that the drugs may not in fact help many of these patients. The trial, which enrolled about 5,000 patients who specifically had preserved ejection fraction after a heart attack, found that long-term treatment with beta blockers did not significantly reduce the combined risk of death or new heart attack, according to results being presented here Sunday at the American College of Cardiology conference and published in the New England Journal of Medicine. (Chen, 4/7)

Johnson & Johnson is pumping more money into heart care with a roughly $13 billion deal for Shockwave Medical, which specializes in technology that helps open clogged arteries. The health care giant said Friday that it will spend $335 in cash for each share of Shockwave. The total deal value includes cash acquired. The deal has already been approved by the boards of directors from both companies. (Murphy, 4/5)

Wegovy, the blockbuster weight-loss medication from Novo Nordisk A/S, eased heart failure symptoms for patients with diabetes in the latest large trial to support use of the drug to treat health conditions linked to obesity. Patients who took Wegovy reported less fatigue, less leg swelling, were less short of breath and were able to walk farther in six minutes than those who got a placebo, researchers reported on Saturday in the New England Journal of Medicine. (Kresge, 4/6)

Across social media, women who have used Ozempic or similar medications for diabetes or weight loss are reporting an unexpected side effect — surprise pregnancies. The Facebook group “I got pregnant on Ozempic,” has more than 500 members. Numerous posts on Reddit and TikTok discuss unplanned pregnancies while on Ozempic and similar drugs which can spur significant weight loss by curbing appetite and slowing the digestive process. The drugs are known as “Glucagon-like peptide 1” or GLP-1 drugs. (Klein, 4/5)

The journal was “an outlier in its sporadic coverage of the rise of Nazi Germany,” wrote the article’s authors, Allan Brandt and Joelle Abi-Rached, both medical historians at Harvard. Often, the journal simply ignored the Nazis’ medical depredations, such as the horrific experiments conducted on twins at Auschwitz, which were based largely on Adolf Hitler’s spurious “racial science.” In contrast, two other leading science journals — Science and the Journal of the American Medical Association — covered the Nazis’ discriminatory policies throughout Hitler’s tenure, the historians noted. The New England journal did not publish an article “explicitly damning” the Nazis’ medical atrocities until 1949, four years after World War II ended. (Nazaryan, 4/6)

Federal regulators are investigating a "pattern of irregularities" in the liver transplant program at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. In a statement Thursday, the hospital said it voluntarily halted liver transplants after it was notified of irregularities related to its "donor acceptance criteria," or physical factors such as height and weight that help physicians decide whether a donated organ is compatible with a transplant candidate. (Gill, 4/5)

The country’s biggest hospital chain, HCA Healthcare, told the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services it doled out almost $1 billion more in financial assistance to needy patients than it reported on its financial statement in 2022, helping the enormously profitable company extract billions of dollars from taxpayer-funded programs. It’s normal for hospital systems to report more charity care — free and discounted care provided to low-income patients — in their annual filings with CMS than on their financial statements. (Bannow, 4/8)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Rising Complaints Of Unauthorized Obamacare Plan-Switching And Sign-Ups Trigger Concern

Federal and state regulators aren’t doing enough to stop the growing problem of rogue health insurance brokers making unauthorized policy switches for Affordable Care Act policyholders, say consumers, agents, nonprofit enrollee assistance groups, and other insurance experts “We think it’s urgent and it requires a lot more attention and resources,” said Jennifer Sullivan, director of health coverage access for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (Appleby, 4/8)

A little-known data firm helps health insurers make more when less of an out-of-network claim gets paid. Patients can be on the hook for the difference. (Hamby, 4/7)

As more healthcare organizations adopt artificial intelligence, there's a newcomer in some C-suites: the chief AI officer. Two-thirds of health systems plan to increase spending on AI by 25% or more in the next three years, according to a survey published in November by consulting firm Healthcare IT Leaders. Health insurers are also increasingly using AI to streamline operations, train employees and enhance customer service. (Perna, 4/5)

Teladoc CEO Jason Gorevic is out at the company he has led for almost 15 years. The Purchase, New York-based telehealth company on Friday announced Gorevic's immediate departure. Mala Murthy, the company’s chief financial officer, is stepping in as interim CEO while the company’s board searches for a CEO. Murthy has been with Teladoc since June 2019. (Perna, 4/5)

A group of public health experts and scientists is calling on the Food and Drug Administration to rescind its controversial approval of a DNA test that promises to predict genetic risk of opioid addiction. In a letter sent to the agency on Thursday, 31 experts in genetics, addiction, psychiatry and medical-device regulation called the approval of AvertD a mistake that relied on faulty science and puts patients at risk. The group sent a separate letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services urging the agency, which oversees government health insurance programs, to deny coverage for the prescription-only test. (Ovalle, 4/5)

For the first time, methamphetamine and cocaine have surpassed heroin and opioids in illicit drug use involving fentanyl, according to a recent study, and some experts are calling it the “fourth wave” of the opioid epidemic. “It’s become quite problematic,” Dr. Chapman Sledge, chief medical officer for Cumberland Heights substance abuse treatment center in Nashville, said. “I was just sitting down with an 18-year-old kid who’s using like 2 grams of fentanyl and 3 grams of methamphetamine every day.” (Gessner, 4/5)

Relatives of a Vermont woman whose obituary drew national attention for its candid and heart-breaking discussion of her opioid addiction have reached a settlement with some of the parties who were sued for allegedly failing to provide adequate medical care. The family of Madelyn Linsenmeir sued the city of Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Hampden County Sheriff's Department, saying law enforcement officials ignored the 30-year-old mother’s pleas for help before she died of an infected heart valve. (4/7)

Dr. Nora Volkow, who leads the National Institutes of Drug Abuse, would like the public to know things are getting better. Mostly. (Richtel, 4/6)

Matthew David Keirans stole the identity of William Donald Woods after they worked together at a hot-dog stand, at least partly sending Woods to jail. (Rosenzweig-Ziff, 4/6)

In state after state, centers for problem gambling are noticing an alarming rise in calls to their helplines. The circumstances reported are also getting more severe, according to the directors of five problem gambling centers, a gambling researcher and an addiction counselor. People are filing for bankruptcy or losing homes or relationships. At the same time, callers are skewing younger, the experts said — often men in their 20s and 30s. (Mogg and Bendix, 4/5)

The Maryland Legislature this weekend passed two sweeping privacy bills that aim to restrict how powerful tech platforms can harvest and use the personal data of consumers and young people — despite strong objections from industry trade groups representing giants like Amazon, Google and Meta. One bill, the Maryland Online Data Privacy Act, would impose wide-ranging restrictions on how companies may collect and use the personal data of consumers in the state. The other, the Maryland Kids Code, would prohibit certain social media, video game and other online platforms from tracking people under 18 and from using manipulative techniques — like auto-playing videos or bombarding children with notifications — to keep young people glued online. (Singer, 4/7)

Unarmed emergency responders Nevada Sanchez and Sean Martin take a police dispatch call in southeast Albuquerque, New Mexico, a city with high rates of violent crime and police shootings. They have no enforcement powers or protective equipment and say they use their voices and brains to deescalate encounters with people in mental health and substance abuse crises. On some occasions they may have saved lives. (Hay, 4/6)

Hundreds of people died and more than 3,000 have been sickened from asbestos exposure in the Libby, Montana area, according to researchers and health officials. (Brown and Hanson, 4/7)

The New Hampshire Senate approved two controversial bills on Friday that have drawn the concern of LGBTQ+ advocates. The bills would bar transgender girls from women’s sports teams starting in 6th grade and including college (Senate Bill 375), and require teachers respond “completely and honestly” to parents’ questions about their child (Senate Bill 341). Advocates are concerned this could cause the forcible “outing” of LGBTQ+ students to their parents, while proponents say parents have a right to know and the bills will restore trust in schools. (Gokee, 4/5)

Staff at the Edgar P. Benjamin Healthcare Center, a historic Boston nursing home in Mission Hill, were ebullient Friday, clapping and cheering as their new, court-appointed manager promised to do everything he could to keep the facility open. “I’m not coming here in order to look to dissolve this organization,” said Joseph Feaster, a Boston attorney appointed as receiver of the facility, which serves a population of mostly Black and Latino residents. “I’m looking to come here to see whether this organization can be sustained.” (Laughlin, 4/5)

As the United States eased into spring, only two states — Kansas and Texas — had increases or likely increases in coronavirus infections as of March 30, according to an update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Searing, 4/8)

Respiratory virus activity in the United States is still elevated but continues to decline, with only 6 jurisdiction reporting high levels, down from 10 the previous week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today in its data updates. Flu markers declined for the third week in a row, following a prolonged rise after the winter holidays, according to the CDC's latest FluView report. Wastewater SARS-CoV-2 detections remain low and declining in most parts of the country, except for a very small rise in the Northeast. For respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), activity continues to decrease across the country, and 8 of 10 regions are now below the 3% test-positivity threshold, suggesting that the RSV season is ending in those areas. (Schnirring, 4/5)

Recommendations that people with long COVID, or post-COVID condition (PCC), should avoid vigorous exercise are probably too strict, according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open from researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. Many long-COVID patients are told to avoid activities that exacerbate symptoms such as fatigue, shortness of breath, and pain, and many report exercise intolerance, or a "flare" in symptoms following exercise. (Soucheray, 4/5)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a health alert Friday to inform clinicians, state health departments and the public of a case of avian influenza — aka bird flu — in a person who had contact with dairy cows in Texas. A farmworker on a commercial dairy farm in Texas developed conjunctivitis last week, and subsequently tested positive for bird flu, the agency said.The positive bird flu diagnosis came after milk from dairy cows in Texas and Kansas tested positive for the disease. (Rumpf-Whitten, 4/5)

Animal health officials in Vietnam and with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) today urged countries to be on alert for a new highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 reassortant virus in chickens and mescovy ducks, which was found during active surveillance. In a statement, the FAO said the virus is a reassortant between the older H5N1 clade (2.3.2.1c) that is still circulating in parts of Asia and a newer H5N1 clade (2.3.4.4b) that began circulating globally in 2021. (Schnirring, 4/5)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Journalists Assess The Risks Of Bird Flu And The Impacts Of Medicaid 'Unwinding'

�鶹Ů�� Health News and California Healthline staff made the rounds on national and local media this week to discuss their stories. Here’s a collection of their appearances. (4/6)

I am a psychiatrist who has worked at a major university’s mental health clinic for 16 years. Much of next year’s freshman class was born the year before I started working here. Technically, my job is to keep my door open and help students through crises, big and small. But I have also developed a comprehensive approach to the assessment and treatment of anxious parents. (Mathilde Ross, 4/8)

This week marks one year since the Great Medicaid Purge (a.k.a. the “unwinding”) began. Early during the pandemic, in exchange for additional funds, Congress temporarily prohibited states from kicking anyone off Medicaid. But as of April 1, 2023, states were allowed to start disenrolling people. (Catherine Rampell, 8/5)

Parkland Health has been helping legislators craft guidelines around the use of artificial intelligence in medicine, one of the few public hospitals doing so among private institutions like Duke and Stanford universities. Parkland’s diligence in trying to harness this new technology helps us all in Dallas County. (4/8)

Ina Pinkney was only 18 months old when she contracted polio in 1944. In those days, there was such trepidation of the disease that, as Ina told me, children who were hospitalized were kept away from their parents. Families could visit with them only one hour a week, through a glass window. (Leana S. Wen, 4/8)

It’s been more than a month since an unprecedented cyberattack nearly brought down a large portion of American healthcare, severely limiting some patients and providers from completing the most basic tasks, such as scheduling appointments, approving medications and certifying insurance eligibility. (Chip Kahn and Dr. Bruce Siegel, 4/8)