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American passengers from the cruise ship at the center of the hantavirus outbreak, including at least one presumed positive case, arrived in Nebraska early Monday for evaluation at a highly specialized quarantine unit before eventually continuing on to their homes – and weeks of monitoring for symptoms of infection. (Boyette and Park, 5/11)

Take a look inside the facility monitoring Americans exposed to hantavirus. (5/11)

A Bay Area resident who was stuck on a cruise ship during a deadly hantavirus outbreak has returned to Santa Clara County and is being monitored by health officials. The Santa Clara County Public Health Department confirmed Sunday that a county resident has returned to California after being exposed to the Andes hantavirus while on the MV Hondius. Three people on board the luxury cruise ship have died, and at least nine others have suspected cases. (Ellis, 5/10)

After the doctor on the cruise ship MV Hondius contracted the hantavirus, an American doctor onboard jumped into action to help passengers navigate the outbreak. Dr. Stephen Kornfeld, an oncologist from Bend, Oregon, told ABC News that he quickly realized he was leading the response to a full-blown medical crisis on board the cruise ship. (Rulli and Jovanovic, 5/9)

The CDC has issued a Health Alert Network (HAN) health advisory on hantavirus, urging clinicians to be aware of the potential for imported cases of hantavirus disease in connection with an outbreak of Andes virus aboard a cruise ship. While the risk of broad spread in the U.S. is "considered extremely unlikely at this time," the agency noted that early symptoms can be easily confused with influenza or other viral illnesses. (Fiore, 5/9)

France on Monday reported its first case of hantavirus when a French national aboard a virus-linked ship tested positive for the disease, said French Health Minister Stéphanie Rist. The woman, one of five French passengers flown back from the MV Hondius and placed in isolation in Paris, started to feel very unwell on Sunday night and "tests came back positive", Rist told the France Inter radio broadcaster. The four other French passengers from the ship tested negative, but will be re-tested, she added. Health authorities said they have so far identified 22 hantavirus contact cases in France. (5/11)

Paratroopers landed on a “golf course covered in rocks” to supply medical personnel and oxygen to Britain’s most remote overseas territory as it deals with a suspected hantavirus case, an army commander has said. The UK Health Security Agency confirmed on Friday that a British national had disembarked from the cruise ship MV Hondius to the South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha, where they live, with a suspected case of hantavirus. (5/10)

The hantavirus outbreak on a cruise that departed from Argentina last month has cast an unwelcome spotlight on Tierra del Fuego, a region well known for its biodiversity and bird-watching, authorities and guides say. Now, bird-watching may be at the epicenter of the outbreak on board the MV Hondius, in which three people have died and five others were sickened. The World Health Organization has said the first person with a confirmed case may have been exposed to rodents — which can carry hantavirus — while on a birding trip. (Romero and Lenthang, 5/10)

As health officials around the world rush to treat and contain the hantavirus outbreak from a cruise ship, they will likely look at how Argentina headed off a similar outbreak and minimized its spread. From November 2018 through February 2019, the country experienced an outbreak that resulted in 34 confirmed infections and 11 deaths all linked back to the Andes virus, the same hantavirus strain believed to have been found in the patients from the cruise ship. (Benadjaoud and Pereira, 5/8)

She caught hantavirus 30 years ago, and it nearly killed her. Here's what she wants you to know. (Trepany, 5/11)

Drug hunters have searched for years for a treatment for the rare infectious disease hantavirus, which caused an outbreak on a cruise ship that global public health officials are now racing to contain. The latest outbreak, which has killed three people and sickened five others, adds increased urgency to those efforts. While hantavirus is generally contracted through exposure to infected rodents, the strain in the current outbreak can be transmitted from person to person. (Loftus, 5/11)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Journalists Shed Light On Deadly Hantavirus Outbreak And A Crisis In The Nation’s ERs 

Céline Gounder, �鶹Ů�� Health News’ editor-at-large for public health, discussed the cruise ship hantavirus outbreak on PBS NewsHour, Fox’s LiveNow From Fox, and CBS News’ CBS Mornings on May 5. She also discussed the hantavirus outbreak on NPR’s Morning Edition on May 6. (5/9)

More than 100 people have been sickened in a norovirus outbreak on a cruise ship operated by Princess Cruises, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on Thursday. Those sickened, who include 102 passengers and 13 crew members, have been isolated from uninfected travelers, the agency said. The cruise ship, the Caribbean Princess, left Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on April 28 and is expected to arrive in Florida on Monday. (MacDonald, 5/8)

The Food and Drug Administration was supposed to be the dull and predictable part of President Trump's health bureaucracy. Instead, it's become the soap opera whose cliffhangers leave entire industries in suspense — most recently Friday's drama over reports that commissioner Marty Makary was about to be booted out. ... The Johns Hopkins physician and researcher appeared to have been spared late last week after multiple outlets reported that President Trump had authorized his firing. (Bettelheim, 5/11)

The Department of Veterans Affairs is significantly expanding its use of virtual reality as a therapeutic tool, partnering with Mynd Immersive to bring immersive experiences to 45 additional VA medical centers nationwide. The initiative reflects a broader institutional shift toward non-pharmacological care, particularly for chronic pain, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress. (Fuller, 5/10)

A judge ruled that the woman should not be deported there, so the Trump administration sent her to Ghana — which returned her to Togo. (Raji, 5/10)

The now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has told Congress it has $19 billion in funds to cover costs associated with closing out the programs it terminated last year, according to a notification sent late last month and obtained by The Hill. The notification acknowledges that the price of closing out the agency is likely to cost less than the multibillion-dollar number, but it’s unclear where the leftover funds will go. Humanitarian aid experts and Democrats are urging the administration to show some urgency in disbursing it for dire humanitarian needs. (Kelly, 5/10)

A new study suggests that the Trump administration’s wave of National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant terminations in 2025 disproportionately affected Black, Indigenous, and other minority researchers, as well as scientists from sexual and gender minority communities. The authors warn that the targeted disruption of these scientist’s careers may reshape the direction of US health research for years to come. (Bergeson, 5/8)

Kirsten Beyer was assessing the benefits of improving school playgrounds in Milwaukee. Then her E.P.A. grant was canceled. (Anthes, 5/8)

The Trump administration launched the website Moms.gov on Mother’s Day in an effort to help provide resources to expecting women and their families. The site’s tagline says it’s “addressing the needs of mothers and fathers who face difficult or unexpected pregnancies and ensuring the well-being of mothers and the health of American families.” Information on the website spans from details about Trump Accounts to breastfeeding, mental health, health centers, nutrition facts and adoption. (Fields, 5/10)

The Food and Drug Administration removed the black box warning from hormone replacement therapies late last year, and recently, the most insured type, the estrogen patch, has been in short supply amid a boom in the therapy’s popularity. “There’s been a surge in demand for the last two or three years where the utilization of transdermal estrogen has gone up significantly,” said Dr. Robert Kauffman, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Texas Tech Physicians of Amarillo. (Sullivan, 5/10)

Louisiana officials in a court filing urged the Supreme Court to leave in place an order from a lower court that blocks women nationwide from obtaining a widely used abortion medication through the mail. The Trump administration, trying to straddle the line on abortion, was silent. Last week, Justice Samuel Alito temporarily paused an order from the conservative U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit that reinstated a requirement that women must visit a health care provider in-person to obtain mifepristone, one of two drugs used in medication abortions. (Weixel, 5/8)

Two years after Florida's six-week abortion ban went into effect, an OB/GYN with over 30 years of experience says he thinks the restrictions have taken a toll on women's pregnancy care — regardless of whether they're seeking to terminate. (Lyden, 5/11)

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D) on Sunday stressed the need for bipartisan cooperation to address maternal healthcare gaps. On Mother’s Day, the two spoke to host Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press” about their work to improve access to care for mothers. Sanders, a mother to three children, touted the Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies Act, which she signed into law last year. The law directed roughly $45 million annually to promote maternal health and established, among multiple provisions, presumptive Medicaid eligibility for pregnant women. (5/10)

The last thing Chelsea Cheveria remembers after the birth of her daughter was greeting her new baby girl. “I said, ‘Hi, oh, that’s my baby,’” Cheveria, 38, recalled. She kissed the tiny newborn, and her husband told her, “You did it.” Then everything went dark. Without warning, Cheveria’s heart stopped as she lay atop the operating table where minutes earlier doctors had delivered her baby Zairah through a cesarean section. (Schencker, 5/10)

Maralee Lellio was surprised to be diagnosed with Stage II breast cancer at 29, but she knew what her next steps would be. Her disease was treatable. Her oncologist recommended chemotherapy and surgery. The treatment was unpleasant, but through it all, she focused on a future goal: welcoming a second child. Lellio dreamed of giving her firstborn daughter, then 2, a sibling. (Breen, 5/9)

A new report released by UnidosUS, the nation's largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization, warns that a decade of progress in Latino healthcare is threatened by the Trump administration's cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The findings suggest that more than 4 million Latinos are among the 14 million Americans projected to lose health insurance over the next decade due to the federal cuts to both national programs. (Bustos, 5/10)

Health insurance exchange customers are fleeing the market in significant numbers, first-quarter earnings reports from large insurers reveal. Publicly traded insurers such as Centene, Molina Healthcare and Elevance Health disclosed that a larger-than-usual share of people who signed up during the open enrollment period are dropping out. These health insurance companies expect aggregate exchange enrollment will shrink by at least 20% over the course of the year owing to huge premium increases and the expiration of enhanced subsidies. (Tepper, 5/8)

State Obamacare marketplaces are starting to feel tremors from the GOP-controlled Congress’s ending of enhanced subsidies, as millions of Americans are dropping coverage. Experts and state officials say the impact varies from state to state, but enrollment decline is expected to grow this year and beyond, as policies from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and potential Trump administration regulation changes take effect. (Weixel, 5/10)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: As Ranks Of Uninsured Grow, Minnesota’s Hospitals Are Among Least Charitable In Nation

Cori Roberts was living in a rented basement four years ago when she was diagnosed with early-stage cervical cancer. Recently divorced, the former stay-at-home mother had started working again in her mid-40s, taking a human resources job that paid $41,000 a year. Then, despite having insurance, she was hit with more than $8,000 in medical bills. “I had my car and a basket of clothes,” Roberts recalled. “Medical bills were not something I could have afforded.” (Levey and Olson, 5/11)

Any day now, the federal government is supposed to unveil a suite of changes to the No Surprises Act’s controversial arbitration process. Health care providers and insurers are racing to have the final word before the new rules are published, but one side is getting a lot more face time with officials. (Bannow, 5/11)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Watch: 8 Health Insurance Terms You Should Know

Health insurance in the U.S. is notoriously confusing. So we’re covering the basics to make navigating your plan a little easier. We explain the difference between a deductible and an out-of-pocket limit, define copay and coinsurance, and point out where surprise bills can get you in trouble, from out-of-network providers to prior authorizations. (Fortiér, 5/11)

People on Medicare are not getting the recently approved Alzheimer’s medications nearly as much as federal officials anticipated. (Herman, 5/11)

Recent issues with Boston Scientific Corp. pacemakers are associated with multiple deaths and thousands of serious injuries. The Food and Drug Administration issued a bulletin Thursday classifying the company’s latest recall to correct its pacemakers as Class I, the most serious type. The problem has been associated with four deaths and 2,557 serious injuries as of March 18, according to the company. (Dubinsky, 5/8)

“Game-changer.” That’s how Prof Misty Jenkins, an immunologist at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, describes CAR T-cell therapy, an emerging but still costly cancer treatment that supercharges the body’s immune system to fight disease. Late last month, Jurassic Park actor Sam Neill put the treatment in the spotlight, revealing his stage three cancer was in remission after undergoing CAR T-cell therapy as part of a clinical trial in Sydney. He stopped short of describing his remission as a miracle – the success, he said, was “science at its best”. (Ryan, 5/9)

North Memorial Health plans to merge with Sanford Health to create a single nonprofit health system. This merger marks Sanford Health's expansion from its Sioux Falls base into the Twin Cities market, following a previous deal with Fairview Health Services that fell apart three years ago. (Zurek, 5/8)

The owners of the now-shuttered West Suburban Medical Center faced off in court Friday over the hospital’s future, amid accusations of mismanagement and questionable fund transfers. (Schencker, 5/8)

The Hiram W. Davis Medical Center has been slated for closure since August 2024, but some Virginia lawmakers remain hesitant to support the plan as families raise concerns about where residents with complex medical needs will go. The state-operated medical center in Petersburg provides long-term care for patients with intellectual or developmental disabilities. (Schabacker, 5/8)

More than two centuries ago, when measles broke out in a household in Japan, the residents might hang on their door a woodblock print bearing an image of the “golden boy” – a heroic character with a baby face and muscled arms meant to warn visitors and protect those already afflicted. When the disease had passed, the print usually would be burned. UCSF has one of the few that survived the era. It’s about the size of a modern sheet of loose-leaf paper, the character dyed red — a color meant to ward off evil — and calligraphy printed across the top. (Allday, 5/10)

Victoria Nodiff-Netanel carries a 32-key piano everywhere, including hospitals, schools, police stations and parties. But it’s not for her to play. She has trained her nine miniature horses to run their muzzles along the keyboard, creating tunes that are as tumultuous as they are amusing. Music is one way the mares, part of Nodiff-Netanel’s nonprofit called Mini Therapy Horses, comfort people, especially hospital patients, in Southern California. (Melnick, 5/9)

Ants can be a nuisance. Just ask officials at a hospital in Canada who are dealing with an “appearance of ants within the operating room” that has forced them to indefinitely suspend some surgeries there. The ants appeared recently at Carman Memorial Hospital in Carman Manitoba, according to a statement from Southern Health-Santé Sud, the provincial authority that oversees the hospital. (Deb, 5/8)

Stuck at home while recovering from mono, Dawn Zuidgeest-Craft received a gift at 7 years old that shaped the rest of her life: a microscope. She loved inspecting mealworms and leaves underneath the lens so much that her mother, Paula Wesner, predicted that her daughter would become a doctor. Zuidgeest-Craft pursued a career in health care years later, becoming a nurse practitioner and pediatric educator. She still planned to become a doctor, but she put her goal on hold while she raised two children. Then she remarried and had two more children, delaying her dream again. (Melnick, 5/10)

The University of Minnesota Medical School is adding a site to its rural family medicine residency program — the only program of its kind in Minnesota. The medical school is partnering with Lakewood Health System to launch a residency in Staples, a small 3,000-person city in west-central Minnesota located across Todd and Wadena counties. Residents will begin with one year of training at North Memorial Health in Minneapolis, followed by two years in Staples. (Work, 5/10)

As nurses continue navigating burnout, staffing shortages and an increasingly complex healthcare system, their role has never been more critical. (Hille, 5/9)

Recess isn’t just a fun break for grade schoolers. It’s crucial to good health and good grades for kids of all ages. That’s the message from a leading pediatricians group, which just released the first new guidance in 13 years about this unstructured time at school and how it needs to be protected. The updated policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics comes after years of shrinking recesses and worsening children’s health. (Ungar, 5/11)

A study from researchers at Loma Linda University in California suggests that eating eggs — fairly frequently — could be linked to lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease among older adults. The findings, published in the Journal of Nutrition, indicated a 27 percent decreased risk of Alzheimer’s among study participants who ate at least five eggs per week, but even participants who ate fewer eggs were said to have a reduced risk, including those who only ate eggs between one and three times per month, according to the study. (Bartiromo, 5/8)

The rate of “deaths of despair” is slowly declining, a new report said, but they are still more prevalent in Appalachia than in the rest of the country. Deaths of despair – those associated with drug overdoses, alcohol, and suicide – had been on the rise nationwide throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the research done for the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC). (Carey, 5/10)

When a child is struggling with a behavioral health crisis, family members often call 911 or take the child to a hospital emergency room for help. But medical providers say that a busy, sometimes chaotic emergency department is not the best place to tackle behavioral health issues. (Knopf, 5/11)

Bloomington native Shayla Woodworth had struggled with mental illness and addiction since she was a teen and spent time in jail in three states. She’d heard of mental health courts before but didn’t know much about them, and assumed they were something of a joke. Then, in 2023, she and her husband stole a car, drove it to the parking lot of a Love’s gas station and fell asleep. They woke up to flashing lights, surrounded by police officers shouting at them with guns drawn. Officers took them to McLean County Jail. (Hauck, McGhee and Adams, 5/8)

Women who spent their 20s and 30s fighting disordered eating, who finally made peace with food in their 40s, are now in their 50s and 60s, facing a new temptation: pharmaceutical appetite suppression. (Bayo Curry-Winchell, 5/8)

The only thing worse than hospital food is hospital food picked by D.C. bureaucrats. (5/10)

Late last month, Utah’s Medical Licensing Board called for the immediate suspension of the state’s pilot program with the AI company Doctronic. The program lets a chatbot evaluate patients and recommend prescription renewals for nearly 200 chronic condition drugs, with the state planning to phase out physician review of each case. (Alon Bergman, 5/11)

I’m used to hearing from people who disagree with me about addiction. I wasn’t expecting to hear from them about artificial intelligence. (Jonathan Avery, 5/11)

Across the vast public outpouring of grief, a common sentiment seemed to emerge: This is unimaginable. But for some parents of children who had been diagnosed with substance use disorder and mental illness, there was a more intimate resonance to the news, and a painful sense of recognition. There were, indeed, specific aspects of this grief that hit them alone. (Caitlin Gibson, 5/11)