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Federal officials are working to move critical hospital supplies out of the path of Hurricane Milton, which is threatening another manufacturer of IV fluids even as hospitals nationwide are still reeling from disruptions caused by flooding at a large factory in North Carolina. Medical manufacturer B. Braun Medical said Wednesday it is working with U.S. health authorities to move its inventory of IV bags to a secure facility away from its plant in Daytona Beach, Florida, which it closed ahead of the storm. (Perrone, 10/9)

U.S. officials approved airlifts of IV fluids from overseas manufacturing plants on Wednesday to ease shortages caused by Hurricane Helene that have forced hospitals to begin postponing surgeries as a way to ration supplies for the most fragile patients. ... On Tuesday, workers at B. Braun, makers of a fourth of the nation’s IV fluids, loaded trucks at the company’s plant in Daytona Beach with the medical bags and drove them north through the night to what they hoped would be a safer location. (Jewett, 10/9)

Following Hurricane Helene-related damage to a key manufacturing site in North Carolina, Baxter International is slowly resuming shipments of intravenous therapy products to hospitals and other customers, but says fully restoring production at the site could take until the end of the year. The Deerfield-based medical equipment manufacturer said today that while it has instituted limits on how many products customers can order at once, it is increasing allocation levels of high-demand IV fluids from 40% to 60% for direct customers, effective immediately. For distributors, Baxter has increased levels from 10% to 60%. (Davis, 10/9)

Hospitals are giving some patients Gatorade and using other workarounds to conserve IV fluids. (Goldman, Bettelheim, 10/10)

Hospitals in Maryland and elsewhere are taking steps to conserve intravenous fluids that have been in short supply since Hurricane Helene flooded a key North Carolina production plant. After the storm shut down a facility near Asheville, North Carolina, operated by Baxter International, producer of more than 60% of IV solutions used in the U.S., the company began limiting what customers can order and declined new customers. Baxter is the country’s largest supplier of IV solutions commonly used to treat and prevent dehydration in patients both in emergency rooms and during surgeries. (Mirabella, Klingaman, 10/9)

A severe solar storm is headed to Earth that could stress power grids even more as the U.S. deals with major back-to-back hurricanes, space weather forecasters said Wednesday. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a severe geomagnetic storm watch for Thursday into Friday after an outburst from the sun was detected earlier this week. Such a storm could temporarily disrupt power and radio signals. (Dunn, 10/10)

The long-dreaded big one is about to reach Florida. And the expected billions in damage from Hurricane Milton could also wreck the state’s still fragile insurance market and potentially disrupt the state’s economy. The storm-prone state has been reeling from insurance problems for years, including spiking premiums for homeowners and insurers retreating completely from the state. Despite some fixes that lawmakers and the industry hoped will stabilize the market, a major storm hitting a heavily populated area — like Milton is projected to do — could erase any progress and send the market into a tailspin. (Fineout, 10/9)

As Florida's Gulf Coast experiences two major hurricanes -- Helene and Milton -- within two weeks, health officials are calling attention to the health risks of the floodwaters left behind by the storms. This week, the Florida Department of Health issued an advisory warning residents to avoid floodwaters in order to prevent exposure to Vibrio vulnificus, a potentially life-threatening bacteria. (Kindelan, 10/9)

Hurricane Milton is set to test the resilience of home-based care providers along the west coast of Florida. While hundreds of healthcare sites reported evacuations ahead of the hurricane, some companies that provide care to patients where they live, including CenterWell and Medically Home, continued to send staff into patients’ homes in the hours before the storm hit. Many home-based care companies are ready to activate contingency plans to keep providing care to patients during and after the hurricane. (Eastabrook, 10/9)

Hurricane Milton is marching closer, promising to leave devastation in its wake. But help is here. The Tampa Bay Times will be regularly updating this list of ways for residents to find up-to-date-information on everything from road closures to power outages, plus where to find food, WiFi, support and more. (George and Calise, 10/10)

As emergency crews respond in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton over the next few days, they’ll have to deal with a lot of dangers in the damage along the Gulf Coast — downed power lines, unstable ruins, leaking natural gas tanks and pipe lines, chemical spills and more. There is one other growing concern that is unique to coastal areas in Florida and other hurricane zones — the spontaneous combustion of electrical vehicles flooded by the salty storm surge. (Miznazi, 10/10)

In a presidential campaign cycle unusually light on health care proposals, Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday unveiled an ambitious — and expensive — Medicare strategy that would introduce a new category of coverage for home health care. The proposal would involve Medicare paying for home health aides to assist older Americans with daily tasks such as eating and using the bathroom. It amounted to a last-minute bet by the Harris campaign that major domestic policy reforms could break through to undecided voters. (Weiland, 10/9)

Vice President Kamala Harris could usher in a new era of prioritizing women’s health if she’s elected president. While Harris has generally toed the Democratic party line on health care policy issues, she has distinguished herself by advocating for reproductive health access and addressing maternal mortality disparities. (Zhang, 10/10)

Kamala Harris' proposal to create a Medicare benefit for long-term home care targets an underappreciated part of the economy: caregiving. The sector is staffed by underpaid and unpaid workers — mostly women — carrying out crucial jobs that will only become more important as the population ages. (Peck, 10/10)

Former President Donald Trump hurled insults at his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, and other women Wednesday — saying he had no interest in stopping his attacks even if they turn off female voters — as Hurricane Milton made landfall, lashing Florida with rain, tornadoes and tropical-storm-force winds. “I don’t want to be nice,” Trump said at his first of two rallies of the day in the pivotal battleground state of Pennsylvania. “You know, somebody said, ‘You should be nicer. Women won’t like it.’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’” (Weissert, Price and Colvin, 10/10)

According to a poll from the American Psychiatric Association, 73% of Americans said they were anxious about the 2024 US election. (Leamey, 10/9)

A top U.S. commercial bakery is pushing back on a Food and Drug Administration warning to stop using labels that say its products contain sesame — a potentially dangerous allergen — when they don’t. Bimbo Bakeries USA, which includes brands such as Sara Lee, Entenmann’s and Ball Park buns and rolls, appears to be defying an FDA warning sent in June that said the several of the company’s products are “misbranded” because the labels list sesame or tree nuts even though those ingredients aren’t in the foods. (Aleccia, 10/9)

U.S. officials have issued a public health alert after a batch of Hans Kissle Co. LLC chicken salads were found to contain the wrong product and undeclared allergens. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), the product—labelled "Cranberry Chicken Salad"—may actually contain the "Classic Chicken Salad," which contains wheat. (Dewan, 10/9)

California-based cheese and dairy company Rizo-Lopez Foods has been ordered to cease production after a years-long listeria outbreak killed two people and made dozens of others sick, the U.S. Department of Justice said on Wednesday. The company has now stopped all of its operations related to the preparing and processing of food according to a press release from the Department of Justice. An injunction approved by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District also said the company must notify the FDA before advancing any future operations of the same kind. (Cervantes Jr., 10/9)

Most American adults said they would rather not take injectable weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic or Wegovy, preferring dietary change instead, according to a survey by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. "These data show that, if doctors imagine that people are unwilling to make major diet changes, such as trying out a plant-based diet, the fact is that many people are quite eager to give it a try, given a practical pathway to follow," Dr. Neal D. Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee, told Newsweek. (Willmoth, 10/9)

If there’s a diet, Janet McCaskill says, she’s done it. “I’ve tried WeightWatchers. I’ve tried keto. I’ve gone to a nutritionist,” said the 58-year-old grandmother, who lives in Knightdale, North Carolina, outside Raleigh. Some of the eating plans worked, she said – until they didn’t. (Tirrell, 10/9)

Telehealth providers treating opioid use disorder, ADHD, and women’s health issues say the sector is in a state of frustration and chaos as the pandemic-era flexibilities that allowed their businesses to thrive are set to end with no new rules in sight. With just months to go before the ability to prescribe controlled substances online dramatically changes overnight, the vacuum of information is forcing them to devote significant energy preparing for the unknown. Companies have hired former regulatory officials to understand how hypothetical policies might impact them, and made backup plans based on speculative, third-hand sketches of proposed rules that might replace virtual prescribing flexibilities that began during the pandemic. (Palmer, Ravindranath and Aguilar, 10/10)

Inflation is easing across much of the economy. For healthcare? Not yet. The cost of employer health insurance rose 7% for a second straight year, maintaining a growth rate not seen in more than a decade, according to an annual survey by the healthcare nonprofit �鶹Ů��. The back-to-back years of rapid increases have added more than $3,000 to the average family premium, which reached roughly $25,500 this year. (Evans, 10/9)

Over the past decade, there has been a clear and unprecedented exodus of young life scientists from academia and into lucrative industry jobs. But new data provide evidence that this trend is slowing, at least for now. The latest numbers from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, an annual National Science Foundation census of freshly minted Ph.D. graduates, show that 61.6% of biomedical scientists who had a job lined up were bound for industry in 2023. That’s a sizable dip from 66.5% in 2022, breaking a decade-long trend of nearly continuous annual increases in the share of graduates headed for the private sector. (Wosen, 10/10)

Medical equipment maker Illumina (ILMN.O) announced on Wednesday its new series of smaller, low-cost benchtop gene sequencers, to make sequencing accessible to more research and testing labs. New generation sequencers, like Illumina's MiSeq devices, help determine the sequence of DNA or RNA to study genetic variation associated with diseases and diagnose rare genetic conditions. ... The new MiSeq i100 systems can be placed on benchtops, allowing smaller labs, which typically outsource gene sequencing, to have these capabilities in-house. (Singh and Satija, 10/9)

Shares of GSK (GSK.L) rose as much as 6.5% on Thursday after the British drugmaker agreed to pay up to $2.2 billion to settle lawsuits in the United States that claimed its discontinued heartburn drug Zantac caused cancer. The agreement, announced on Wednesday, was far lower than some analyst estimates, including JP Morgan's projection of $3.5 billion. The settlement resolves 80,000 or 93% of the pending cases against the company in the U.S. (10/10)

A federal judge on Wednesday signed-off on a plea agreement resolving charges against Magellan Diagnostics that it concealed a malfunction in its lead-testing devices that led to thousands of patients receiving inaccurately low results. U.S. District Judge Patti Saris in Boston accepted the plea agreement and imposed a sentence requiring Magellan to pay $32.7 million, a portion of the overall $42 million it agreed to pay as part a deal with the U.S. Department of Justice whose "unusual" terms Saris had previously questioned. (Raymond, 10/9)

Electronic health record giant Epic and startup Particle Health have agreed to a resolution put forward by a national interoperability nonprofit caught in the middle, but the dispute will continue playing out in a federal court. Both sides expressed satisfaction with the resolution developed by Carequality, an industry stakeholder group aiming to increase interoperability between vendors, clinics, hospitals and third-party health tech companies. (Turner, 10/9)

Former Pfizer (PFE.N) CEO Ian Read and ex-CFO Frank D'Amelio said they will not be involved with activist investor Starboard Value, which reportedly wants the U.S. drug giant to make changes to turn its performance around. "We have decided not to be involved in the efforts of Starboard Value regarding Pfizer," the executives said in a statement on Wednesday, which was issued by Guggenheim Partners, an advisor to Pfizer. (10/10)

More than 370 million girls and women alive today, or one in every eight worldwide, experienced rape or sexual assault before the age of 18, the United Nations children's agency said on Wednesday. The number rises to 650 million, or one in five, when taking into account "non-contact" forms of sexual violence, such as online or verbal abuse, UNICEF reported, in what it called the first global survey of the problem. (10/10)

A new study found that 3 in 4 high school students experienced at least one potentially traumatic event involving violence, abuse or exposure to mental health or substance use problems. And, notably, 1 in 5 high school students said they experienced at least four of these potentially traumatic events. Health experts call these events adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, and they've been shown to increase the risk of developing chronic health problems and mental health issues in adulthood. (Rodriguez, 10/9)

Nearly all U.S. adults agree that more action can be taken to reduce suicide deaths, with about three-fifths also reporting they have been personally affected by suicide, according to national survey data released Wednesday. Sixty-one percent of adults said they know someone who has considered, attempted or died by suicide, according to the 2024 Public Perception of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Poll, conducted by The Harris Poll. The biennial survey found that number has consistently risen, from 53 percent in 2018 to 55 percent in 2020 and 59 percent in 2022. (Raman, 10/9)

It had only been a year since Estelle Sievert and her wife, Jane, joined the foster care program at SAFE Alliance in Austin when they were introduced to 3-week-old Noah in 2022. The couple immediately fell in love with their soon-to-be adopted son but knew the future might contain some challenges. The infant’s biological parent had a lifetime of severe mental illness compounded by years of using methamphetamines and PCP that went unaddressed, and studies show that trauma and mental illness can be passed down through generations. (Simpson, 10/9)

After weathering the storm at home in the town of Marion, A.C. was without power and water and decided to make the 30 mile-trip to Asheville to get supplies. A.C. is the manager of a local restaurant and also wanted to check on her business and make sure her employees were okay. (NC Health News is using initials to shield this woman’s identity because of the online bullying and threats she received after posting and sharing video about her experience on social media.) Similar to many western North Carolina residents, A.C. had been cut off from the world by Hurricane Helene — not knowing the full extent of the damage until she ventured out four days after the storm. (Knopf, 10/10)

The majority of footballers say their mental health is impacted by fear of injury, according to latest research from the Professional Footballers’ Association. An anonymous survey of over 1,000 male and female professional footballers during the 2023-24 season found 68 per cent cited injury concerns as having a major impact on their mental wellbeing. (Rampling, 10/9)

Chaylvin Oliveira-Kalama called his family almost every day from Halawa prison, and before he died he told his mother the voices he heard in his head were getting worse.The 30-year-old inmate had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and depression. Sometimes the voices that only he could hear advised him that if he killed himself, his mother and her husband would be “safe." ... But on June 18 Chaylvin hanged himself in his cell. (Dayton, 10/9)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Older Men’s Connections Often Wither When They’re On Their Own

At age 66, South Carolina physician Paul Rousseau decided to retire after tending for decades to the suffering of people who were seriously ill or dying. It was a difficult and emotionally fraught transition. “I didn’t know what I was going to do, where I was going to go,” he told me, describing a period of crisis that began in 2017. Seeking a change of venue, Rousseau moved to the mountains of North Carolina, the start of an extended period of wandering. Soon, a sense of emptiness enveloped him. (Graham, 10/10)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Watch: ‘Breaking The Silence Is A Step’ — Beyond The Lens Of ‘Silence In Sikeston’

�鶹Ů�� Health News Midwest correspondent Cara Anthony discusses her reporting for the “Silence in Sikeston” multimedia project, which explores the impact of a 1942 lynching and a 2020 police killing on a rural Missouri community — and what it led her to learn about her own family’s past. (Anthony, 10/10)

An international team of investigators this week published phase 3 clinical trial data supporting aztreonam-avibactam as a potential therapeutic option for patients with serious gram-negative bacterial infections with limited treatment options. ... It was approved in April by the European Medicines Agency based on the results of two phase 3 clinical trials that evaluated its efficacy in treating several types of multidrug-resistant infections. (Dall, 10/9)

A study of long-term care (LTC) facilities in Massachusetts found that residents with a documented penicillin allergy were 95% less likely to receive beta-lactam antibiotics, researchers reported yesterday in Antimicrobial Stewardship & Healthcare Epidemiology. ... Previous research has shown that penicillin allergy labels are frequently inaccurate and can result in the selection of broader-spectrum antibiotics, which contribute to antimicrobial resistance and have an increased risk of side effects. (Dall, 10/9)

The rate of hospitalization and death is significantly higher after COVID-19 reinfection among unvaccinated US veterans than after breakthrough infection among never-infected vaccine recipients, according to an analysis published yesterday in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. ... The median age was 56 years, 91% were men, and 80% were White. (Van Beusekom, 10/9)

COVID-19 could increase the risk of major cardiac events, like strokes and heart attacks, according to a study from the Keck School of Medicine of University of Southern California; the University of California, Los Angeles; and Cleveland Clinic released Wednesday. The findings revealed individuals with A, B and AB blood types that contracted a severe version of COVID-19 are more likely to have future heart problems than people with an O blood type who had a severe version of COVID-19. (Fields, 10/9)

The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded Tuesday to two pioneering scientists who laid the groundwork for the revolutionary advances in artificial intelligence, and one of the new laureates wasted no time in warning that those advances potentially pose risks to society. “We have no experience with what it’s like to have things smarter than us,” Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto said minutes after the announcement that he and John Hopfield of Princeton University had been awarded the physics prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. (Achenbach, Ortega and Tiku, 10/8)

The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) today announced two more presumptive H5 avian flu positives in dairy workers, which if confirmed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), would raise the state’s total to five over the past few weeks. The two new possible cases were reported from the Central Valley, and so far there are no known links among the human cases, suggesting that only animal-to-human transmission is occurring in the state, the CDPH said in a statement. (Schnirring, 10/9)

New York officials denied a bankruptcy-court-authorized buyer’s application to acquire the Harborside on Long Island, upending the sale and again leaving hundreds of residents at the three-time-bankrupt retirement community at risk of losing their homes. The New York State Department of Health denied the application filed by the Harborside’s court-authorized new manager, an affiliate of major retirement-home operator Life Care Services Communities, according to a letter dated Oct. 3 obtained by The Wall Street Journal. (Matsuda, 10/9)

Two weeks ago, as the Adams administration was beginning its implosion, New York City’s health commissioner, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, announced that he would step down in January. ... Among his accomplishments, Dr. Vasan established HealthyNYC, an initiative to extend the life expectancy of New Yorkers to 83 by the end of the decade. ... While, on the face of it, a modest goal, it inevitably bumps up against the realities of an overburdened emergency-care system that further reveals the deficiencies of the city’s transportation policy in all of its life-or-death consequence. (Bellafante, 10/10)

Less than half of the likely electorate in Florida say they would vote for an amendment that would legalize abortion up to the point of fetal viability, according to a New York Times and Siena College poll published Tuesday. The survey, conducted from Sept. 29 to Oct. 6, found that among likely voters in the state, 46 percent said they would vote for Amendment 4, which would legalize abortions up to what is about the 24th week of pregnancy, while 38 percent they wouldn’t vote for it. (Ventura, 10/9)

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) called for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate youth residential treatment facilities operated by multiple national health care companies, alleging evidence of civil rights violations and Medicaid fraud. In two letters to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Wyden claimed evidence showed “civil rights violations of children and young people” as well as “abuse, neglect, and fraud” carried out by four operators of youth residential treatment facilities: Universal Health Services, Acadia Healthcare, Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health and Vivant Behavioral Healthcare. (Choi, 10/9)

For students experiencing homelessness, the start of a new academic year can be fraught with anxiety. Unstable housing, food insecurity and lack of transportation to and from school are just a few of the challenges they and their families may face. Federal law requires school districts to meet these challenges. But, as The Midwest Newsroom’s investigative series Unhoused/Unschooled found, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska school districts are undercounting students who are homeless, which means thousands are not getting the support they need. In many cases, school districts don’t even apply for available grants. (Mansouri and Wheaton, 10/9)

The City of St. Louis is seeing lower-than-expected revenue from the sale of recreational marijuana. Officials had projected the city would raise $2.4 million, or about $200,000 a month, from the 3% tax in the current fiscal year. But Budget Director Paul Payne told a meeting of the Board of Aldermen's appropriations committee on Wednesday that the numbers are lagging. (Lippmann, 10/9)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Montana Looks To Fast-Track Medicaid Access For Older Applicants

Montana is looking to fast-track Medicaid access for older adults who need help to stay in their homes or towns. Medicaid, the joint federal-state health care program for low-income Americans, opens the door to services such as paying for help to prepare meals or shower safely. But applying for and obtaining that coverage can take weeks or months, leaving aging people in a dangerous limbo: too vulnerable to live at home without assistance, but too healthy to merit a hospital or nursing home bed. (Houghton, 10/10)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Happening In Springfield: New Immigrants Offer Economic Promise, Health System Challenges

When Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance claimed Haitian immigrants had caused infectious-disease rates to “skyrocket” in Springfield, Ohio, local health commissioner Chris Cook checked the records. They showed that in 2023, for example, there were four active tuberculosis cases in Clark County, which includes Springfield, up from three in 2022. HIV cases had risen, but sexually transmitted illnesses overall were decreasing. (Armour, 10/10)

Researchers have shown that six years after treatment with the first gene therapy approved for CALD, 94 percent of patients have had no decline in neurological functioning, with over 80 percent remaining free of major disability. (Mass General Brigham, 10/9)

New research shows COVID-19 infections increase the risk of heart attack, stroke, and death, in some cases doubling the likelihood of major cardiac events in the 3 years following infection. (Soucheray, 10/9)

A new study has found some cancers to be slightly more frequent in people with multiple sclerosis (MS) than in people without MS. Types of cancers found to have a small increased risk include bladder, brain and cervical cancers. (American Academy Of Neurology, 10/9)

Too many American families know the struggle of caring for an aging parent who doesn’t want to leave their home but can no longer fully take care of themself. According to the Niskanen Center, more than 14 million Americans require long-term support services. That number is projected to grow to 24 million by 2030. (10/9)

In early 2020, as Covid began its relentless spread, I and other public health experts urgently warned the Trump administration and senior advisers about critical shortages in medical supplies and the desperate need for a coordinated national response. Our recommendations, grounded in decades of pandemic preparedness planning, were not just ignored — they were actively suppressed. (Rick Bright, 10/10)

The ink had scarcely dried on new federal rules for enforcement of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 when U.S. health plans threatened potential legal action to block them. (David Lloyd, 10/10)

Normally, hospitals are, well, flush with IV fluids. But right now, that isn’t the case. In addition to the physical damage to many hospitals and clinics in the region, Hurricane Helene knocked out one of the primary manufacturing plants for IV solutions. The Baxter manufacturing plant in Marion, N.C., which produces about 60% of the IV solutions for the U.S., is not currently operational. (Andrew Pasternak, 10/9)