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Democrats have set the stage for a convention this week packed with boasts about some of their most popular health care policy wins and future moonshot goals. The four-day event in Chicago will kick off as former President Trump increases attacks on rising inflation, economic hardship, and border control policies under the Biden administration. The Republican candidate has not dwelled much on health care in his campaign rhetoric. But Democrats see topics from reproductive rights to lower drug prices as winning issues with voters. (Owermohle, 8/18)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Harris-Walz Ticket Sharpens Contrast With Trump-Vance On Health Care 

Vice President Kamala Harris’ selection of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate is making health care a front-burner issue in the final sprint to the November presidential election. Walz, a 60-year-old former high school teacher and football coach, has a record of supporting left-leaning health care initiatives during his two terms as governor and while serving in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2007 to 2019. (Armour, 8/19)

Democrats on Monday evening will spotlight the stories of women placed in medical peril because of state abortion bans, part of an effort by the party to capitalize on the lasting anger over the Supreme Court’s decision in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade. All three women who are scheduled to speak on the first night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago have become prominent surrogates for the party’s ticket on the campaign trail, offering their deeply personal testimonials in campaign ads, White House meetings and political events. (Lerer, 8/19)

Planned Parenthood is offering more than a free T-shirt or sticker at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) this coming week — the organization will offer free vasectomies, medication abortion, and emergency contraception. Planned Parenthood Great Rivers of St. Louis announced in a X post that a bus is headed to the DNC in Chicago on Aug. 19-20 to offer free services. (Rumpf-Whitten, 8/17)

Democrats are holding their nominating convention this week in Illinois, a state that’s become a critical access point for patients seeking abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade just over two years ago. Hope Clinic is in western Illinois — near the border with Missouri, where most or all abortions are now illegal. The situation is similar for most of Illinois’ neighboring states. In recent years, Hope and other clinics across Illinois have increased hours and staffing to accommodate an influx of patients from outside the state. (McCammon, 8/19)

A crowd of hundreds called for abortion and LGBTQ+ rights Sunday evening in downtown Chicago, getting a head start on a week of protests before the Democratic National Convention kickoff Monday. ... The rally and march took place a week after the coalition Bodies Outside of Unjust Laws — endorsed by more than 30 local and national organizations — won a permit for a route on Michigan Avenue following a long legal battle with the city. (Perez, 8/18)

The US Food and Drug Administration is poised to sign off as soon as this week on updated Covid-19 vaccines targeting more recently circulating strains of the virus, according to two sources familiar with the matter, as the country experiences its largest summer wave in two years. (Tirrell, 8/18)

The KP.3.1.1 COVID-19 variant is the dominant strain of the virus, the latest projections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show. The agency's Nowcast data tracker, which displays COVID-19 estimates and projections for two-week periods, projects the KP.3.1.1 variant is accounting for 36.8% of positive infections, followed by KP.3 at 16.8% in the two-week stretch starting Aug. 4. (Forbes, 8/16)

COVID-19 activity remains elevated across most of the United States, but some regions of the country are seeing some declines, as the proportion of KP.3.1.1 variant continues to rise, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today in its latest updates. Nationally, wastewater detections of SARS-CoV-2 are at the very high level for the second straight week. The highest levels are still in the West and South, followed by the Midwest and the Northeast. The CDC's latest update, however, shows downward trends from high levels in the South and Midwest. (Schnirring, 8/16)

Missouri is one of 27 states where levels of COVID-19 are currently “very high” in wastewater, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Wastewater testing is used as a tool to track potential outbreaks and trends. While watershed data can’t tell researchers how many people are infected with COVID-19, the virus can be detected in a person’s waste even before they are symptomatic. (Shackelford-Nwanganga, 8/16)

Across much of the country, experts fear rising COVID-19 infections this summer could foreshadow a more significant surge of the virus yet to come as temperatures cool off. “We're kind of in the midst of a rapid run of covid cases throughout Indian Country,” said Dean Seneca, who identifies as Seneca. He is founder and CEO of Seneca Scientific Solutions+, a public health and urban and regional planning company. (Mills, 8/17)

Humana has agreed to pay $90 million to settle a whistleblower lawsuit by one of its former actuaries accusing the health insurer of overcharging the U.S. government for prescription drugs, the whistleblower's lawyers announced on Friday. The whistleblower, Steven Scott, said that Humana, which contracts with the federal Medicare program to administer prescription drug benefits, misrepresented its true costs in order to get a more lucrative contract. It is the first settlement with any insurer over allegations of fraud tied to Medicare's prescription drug contracting process, according to the law firm Phillips & Cohen, which represents Scott. (Pierson, 8/16)

The government’s announcement confirmed what companies had been telegraphing in second-quarter results calls: The initial hit to earnings from the Inflation Reduction Act, which allows Medicare to directly negotiate the prices of some drugs, is going to be mild. There are a few reasons for that. For one, many drugs were already going off patent soon and therefore were set to face price erosion anyway. Secondly, the drugs are already discounted in order to be placed on pharmacy-benefit managers’ formularies. (Wainer, 8/16)

As the Federal Trade Commission scrutinizes the pharmaceutical industry, there is growing debate about whether the regulator may next target a deal that some experts say could make it easier for Novo Nordisk to boost production of a key drug — at the expense of competitors. (Silverman, 8/19)

Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs were supposed to revolutionize the battle against obesity. But evidence shows big economic and racial disparities in access. (Cha, 8/19)

Though appendectomies have been the gold standard of care since before the turn of the 20th century, doctors have been treating appendicitis with antibiotics since the 1950s, as soon as they became available — a “dark secret” in the surgery world, says David R. Flum, professor of surgery and director of the Surgical Outcomes Research Center at the University of Washington. (Dattaro, 8/17)

In huge numbers, older people are taking gabapentin for a variety of conditions, including itching, alcohol dependence and sciatica. “It’s crazy,” one expert said. (Span, 8/17)

A new working draft study out of Wake Forest University is the most comprehensive analysis of the personnel crisis at Mission Hospital to date, using hundreds of interviews, documents and media reports to tell the story of a mass exodus of doctors, a poor working environment for nurses and a dangerous situation for patients, all brought on by profit-centered management. (Jones, 8/17)

Lifespan, Boston Medical Center and Lawrence General Hospital tentatively agreed to take over six Steward Health Care hospitals in Massachusetts, state officials announced Friday. If the proposals are finalized, Providence, Rhode Island-based Lifespan would acquire and operate Morton Hospital in Taunton and St. Anne’s Hospital in Fall River, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey (D) said in a news release. (Kacik, 8/16)

For three days last month — after a botched update from the security software firm CrowdStrike brought down an estimated 8.5 million Windows devices around the world — a roving band of IT experts descended upon University of Maryland Medical System hospitals and outpatient centers to root out devices stricken by the dreaded “blue screen of death.” (Roberts, 8/19)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Bipartisan Effort Paves Way For Reviving Shuttered Hospitals In Georgia

At the shuttered Atlanta Medical Center, a “Stronger Together” mural sends a hopeful message near a summer spray of hydrangeas. The campus was mostly quiet on a recent weekend, since AMC closed almost two years ago. A lone security vehicle sat behind a chain-link fence, and pedestrians passed by without even a glance. In the town of Cuthbert, some 160 miles away, the Southwest Georgia Regional Medical Center also remains shut after closing four years ago, another Southern hospital casualty in a region dotted with them. (Miller and Whitehead, 8/19)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Inside The Political Fight To Build A Rural Georgia Hospital

Ed Whitehouse stood alongside a state highway in rural Butts County, Georgia, and surveyed acres of rolling fields and forests near Interstate 75. Instead of farmland and trees, he envisioned a hospital. Whitehouse, a consultant for a local health care company that wants to build a hospital there with at least 150 beds, said the group could break ground within a year. The idea, he said, is to provide medical services beyond those currently provided by Wellstar Sylvan Grove Medical Center, an aging, nonprofit “critical access” hospital that offers limited services, including emergency care, rehabilitation, wound care, and imaging. (Miller and Whitehead, 8/19)

A Georgia couple is suing a health care system after they say staff at one of its Atlanta hospitals misplaced a portion of the husband’s skull, which had been temporarily removed and later scheduled to be reimplanted, according to a complaint. (Williams, 8/17)

A small, Black-owned radiology practice in Laurel is suing the University of Maryland Medical System for engaging in unfair and discriminatory bidding practices. The suit alleges UMMS inked a no-bid agreement with a Los Angeles-based radiology company to provide outpatient radiology services on its Laurel campus. (Roberts, 8/19)

The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Friday to let President Joe Biden's administration enforce a key part of a new rule protecting LGBT students from discrimination in schools and colleges based on gender identity in 10 Republican-led states that had challenged it. The justices denied the administration's request to partially lift lower court injunctions that had blocked the entirety of the rule expanding protections under Title IX, a law that bars sex discrimination in federally funded education programs, while litigation continues. The lower court decisions had prevented the U.S. Education Department from enforcing the new rule, announced in April and set to take effect on Aug. 1, in Tennessee, Louisiana and eight other states. (Chung, 8/16)

Some school nurses and other education officials in Tennessee say a new law requiring parental consent before rendering medical or psychological treatment to students has left them scratching their heads in need of clarity. The new Families' Rights and Responsibilities Act bars government entities or health care providers from treating, operating on, diagnosing, offering prescriptions or rendering psychological counseling to children without first obtaining parental consent, except in emergency situations. (Penley, 8/16)

Haywood Park Community Hospital was the closest hospital for many in Brownsville, Tennessee, a rural city in the eastern part of the state. Some residents believe it kept their loved ones alive. But others in this majority-Black city said they drove to a hospital miles away or skipped care completely. The facility eventually closed in 2014 after a decline in patients. (Hunter, 8/16)

The first at-home, over-the-counter antibody test for syphilis received marketing authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Friday. This means biotechnology company NOWDiagnostics, Inc., which manufactures the test, now has a license to sell it. ... The new test, called First To Know, uses a drop of blood to offer an early indication that a person may have syphilis, with results available in about 15 minutes. The results must be confirmed by a doctor.(Salzman and Kekatos, 8/16)

For some, pap smears are an uncomfortable but necessary evil when it comes to health screenings. For others, it's an experience bad enough to avoid a doctor's visit, risking not detecting cancer cells early. But this year, some health care companies are preparing to introduce self-collection options, allowing patients to skip awkward interfaces with healthcare professionals. (Moniuszko, 8/16)

Removing fallopian tubes during sterilization is about as safe as sterilization procedures that damage the tubes but leave them intact, a new study suggests — a finding that could help reduce some women’s risk of ovarian cancer. Swedish researchers found little difference in the risk for surgical complications between the two methods, they write in the journal Lancet Regional Health – Europe. (Blakemore, 8/18)

Women who received uterus transplants have delivered more than 70 infants worldwide since the first successful transplant in 2011, with 20 cases at a Texas medical center showing about the same success rate as with natural wombs, per new research in JAMA. (Goldman, 8/19)

In a groundbreaking medical achievement, the first fully mechanical heart developed by BiVACOR has been successfully implanted in a human patient. This milestone marks a significant advancement in the field of cardiac care, offering new hope for those awaiting heart transplants. ... The primary purpose of the BiVACOR TAH is to serve as a bridge-to-transplant solution. ... Since 2011, adult heart transplants have increased significantly by 85.8%. This device could be a lifeline for many of those patients. (Knutsson, 8/18)

The nation is facing an emergency blood shortage, according to the American Red Cross. Extreme heat and recent natural disasters are affecting the blood supply, the nonprofit says. Not only is there a shortage of donations across the country, but there is also a specific need for Type O blood, according to Vitalant, an Arizona-based nonprofit that operates blood banks nationwide. (Tsai, 8/18)

An outbreak of salmonella linked to recalled cucumbers has sickened 449 people in 31 states and the District of Columbia, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an update. The CDC is among the federal and state agencies investigating the outbreak, determining that cucumbers contaminated with salmonella made people sick. (Gibson, 8/16)

Check your freezer. Perdue Foods is recalling more than 167,000 pounds of frozen chicken nuggets and tenders after some customers reported finding metal wire embedded in the products. According to Perdue and the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, the recall covers select lots of three products: Perdue Breaded Chicken Tenders, Butcher Box Organic Chicken Breast Nuggets and Perdue Simply Smart Organics Breaded Chicken Breast Nuggets. (8/18)

The CDC advisory issued Friday recommends that pregnant people reconsider nonessential travel to Cuba, which reported its first confirmed case in June. (Sun, 8/17)

A man in his 80s who was exposed in Worcester County is the state’s first human case of Eastern equine encephalitis since 2020, and risk levels for the mosquito-borne illness have been elevated in that region, Massachusetts health officials announced Friday. Generally spread to humans through the bite of an infected mosquito, the disease is rare, yet serious and potentially fatal to people of all ages, officials said. (Alanez, 8/16)

Orange County vector control officials are urging residents to keep their pets, bodies and homes flea free after a human case of flea-borne typhus was detected in the city of Fountain Valley this month. The infection of an unidentified individual in the vicinity of Slater Avenue and Magnolia Street marks the fifth human case of the bacterial disease — carried by fleas and spread to other species through fecal matter — in Orange County this year. (Cardine, 8/16)

Beating the heat in the US is a little harder this summer than it used to be: E. coli and cyanobacteria are causing widespread beach closures at lakes and rivers. It’s a problem exacerbated by climate change-fueled warmer waters and more prolific downpours, which are creating perfect conditions for bacteria to flourish. (Battle Abdelal, 8/17)

Trupanion, a Seattle-based pet insurance company, is partnering with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to create a disease tracking system for pets, the company announced this week. The system will draw on insurance claims submitted to Trupanion in real time when sick dogs and cats visit the veterinarian. “The concept is to proactively detect potential threats to pets and public health,” said Dr. Steve Weinrauch, the chief veterinary and product officer at Trupanion. (Anthes, 8/16)

Danish biotech firm Bavarian Nordic said on Saturday it plans to ramp up production of its mpox vaccine and work with international health organizations to ensure fair access as the disease has been declared a global public health emergency. The company, one of the few drug firms that have an mpox vaccine, said it has informed the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that it can manufacture 10 million doses of the vaccine by the end of 2025, and could already supply up to 2 million doses this year. (8/17)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Journalists Discuss African Mpox Upsurge, EpiPen Alternative, And Medicaid Unwinding

�鶹Ů�� Health News and California Healthline staff made the rounds on national and state media this week to discuss topical stories. Here’s a collection of their appearances. (8/17)

It’s critical to appreciate that each day, round-the-clock shifts of ED staff show up to perform their overwhelmingly difficult tasks without the necessary resources and support to manage the flow as the system crashes around them. But there is also no escaping the conclusion that waiting in the ED could make your condition worse. This is a broken system where the insistence on revenue and profits has accelerated, leading to a massive failure to deliver care. It is a false narrative to call it an inevitable crisis that must be endured. (Lauren Stiller Rikleen, 8/19)

Last week, the White House announced a milestone in health care policy. After decades of effort, and for the first time, the government successfully negotiated drug prices directly with pharmaceutical companies. For years, the fight to control health care prices, perhaps the most significant factor in health care spending, has felt like an unwinnable battle, so it’s no small feat that Medicare is finally flexing its negotiating muscles. But it’s also a drop in the bucket. (Aaron E. Carroll, 8/19)

In the raucous rally with Biden, Harris declared, “No senior should have to choose between filling their prescription or paying their rent.” She touted her own background in fighting Big Pharma as California attorney general and in the Senate. Now, she argued, “Medicare can use [its] power to go toe-to-toe with Big Pharma.” (Jennifer Rubin, 8/18)

Access to medical education is important, because to help communities throughout our nation, we must address shortages and lapses in representative health care. Despite comprising 19 percent of the population, Hispanics only make up 6.9 percent of physicians. While Black and African American individuals make up 13.6 percent of the U.S. population, they only account for 5.7 percent of the nation's physicians. These discrepancies exacerbate the nation's current physician shortage. (Leonardo Seoane, 8/15)

Private equity firms are sucking the resources out of America’s hospitals and nursing homes, and feeding on doctors to generate profits. These firms — which pool funds from wealthy investors and are exempt from many of the regulations and disclosure requirements that apply to other types of investments — have spent a half-trillion dollars since 2018 buying up medical resources. (Steffie Woolhandler, David U. Himmelstein, Elizabeth Schrier and Hope Schwartz, 8/19)