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President Biden called Monday for a constitutional amendment overturning the Supreme Court’s recent decision awarding former presidents immunity for crimes they commit while in office—and endorsed proposals for a mandatory ethics code and 18-year term limit for justices. “In recent years, extreme opinions that the Supreme Court has handed down have undermined long-established civil rights principles and protections,” Biden said, speaking at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. He cited decisions that the court’s right-leaning majority views as landmark achievements, including rulings that limited federal voting-rights protections, overturned Roe v. Wade and ended affirmative action in college admissions. (Bravin, 7/29)

Under Mr. Biden’s term-limit plan, presidents would appoint a new Supreme Court justice every two years. If that rule had already been in effect over the past two decades and each justice had served the full 18-year term, the court’s ideological split would be flipped, as this chart shows. (Shao, 7/29)

A small hospital in Washington state and 800 other so-called “tweener” hospitals could gain an important label and more financial security in a post-Chevron world. The 67-bed Olympic Medical Center in Port Angeles, Washington, is too large to be considered a critical access hospital and too small to be a rural referral center. Critical access hospitals with no more than 25 beds are paid 101% of their costs for many Medicare services. (Kacik, 7/29)

As Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sought to privately battle cancer, federal prosecutors said Monday, her health records reached a dark corner of the internet where users floated antisemitic conspiracy theories. Her information, according to prosecutors and court testimony from an FBI agent, was accessed by a former organ transplant coordinator while she was under the care of George Washington University Hospital in 2019 and then posted to the online message board 4chan, which is known for salacious and conspiracy-themed discussions. (Rizzo, 7/29)

The Senate is expected to pass legislation Tuesday that is designed to protect children from dangerous online content, pushing forward with what would be the first major effort by Congress in decades to hold tech companies more accountable for the harm that they cause. The bill has sweeping bipartisan support and has been pushed by parents of children who died by suicide after online bullying. It would force companies to take reasonable steps to prevent harm on online platforms frequently used by minors, requiring them to exercise “duty of care” and ensure that they generally default to the safest settings possible. (Jalonick, 7/30)

MultiPlan CEO Travis Dalton, whose data analytics company is under fire from providers and lawmakers amid allegations that it is colluding with health insurers, said his recent meetings on Capitol Hill couldn’t have gone better. Following demands from Congress for the DOJ and FTC to open investigations into MultiPlan’s business practices, Dalton held several meetings with Senate staffers over the past few weeks, during which he defended his company and showed how it uses publicly available data to recommend how much providers should be paid for out-of-network care. (Hooper, 7/30)

LGBTQ+ dating app Grindr is tapping into the Washington lobbying world amid legislative battles over reproductive health care access. The “Global Gayborhood” has hired The Daschle Group, founded by former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, to lobby on “HIV prevention; LGTBQ family formation challenges including surrogacy and IVF,” according to federal disclosures filed last week. (Florko and Owermohle, 7/29)

After joining the Senate last year, JD Vance became one of the most outspoken lawmakers about the decline in U.S. fertility. The issue has long been on Vance’s mind. In an interview in April with The Wall Street Journal, Vance described low fertility as having many causes, no simple remedy and negative consequences beyond simply a smaller workforce and less sustainable programs such as Social Security. (Ip and Adamy, 7/29)

After locking up the support to be the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris’s campaign launched a blitz of abortion-related campaign activities Monday, including events hosted by second gentleman Doug Emhoff and advocates. The campaign also released a video with the vice president condemning a new abortion law in Iowa, hoping to energize women and independent voters with her promise to protect abortion rights. (Lucey, Kusisto and Salama, 7/29)

Kamala Harris jumped into the presidential race with a broad pledge to “restore reproductive freedom.” The Harris campaign specified Monday that she’s calling for restoring Roe v. Wade. While many abortion-rights groups are championing her bid for the White House, some activists are frustrated with her position on the issue and plan to keep pushing to go further than President Joe Biden. (Messerly and Ollstein, 7/29)

The Kremlin is turning to unwitting Americans and commercial public relations firms in Russia to spread disinformation about the U.S. presidential race, top intelligence officials said Monday, detailing the latest efforts by America’s adversaries to shape public opinion ahead of the 2024 election. The warning comes after a tumultuous few weeks in U.S. politics that have forced Russia, Iran and China to revise some of the details of their propaganda playbook. What hasn’t changed, intelligence officials said, is the determination of these nations to seed the internet with false and incendiary claims about American democracy to undermine faith in the election. (Klepper, 7/29)

The gunman who tried to assassinate Donald Trump began making dozens of gun-related purchases and stocking up on bomb-making materials more than a year ago, FBI officials said Monday, the strongest indication yet that he had been planning an attack well before he opened fire on the former president. Thomas Matthew Crooks made 25 different gun-related buys online between spring 2023 and the first half of this year, and bought material used in explosives six times, officials said, offering new glimpses into their far-ranging investigation into the July 13 shooting at a campaign rally in western Pennsylvania. Crooks made the purchases online using an alias. (Gurman and Barber, 7/29)

A trial looming in a lawsuit challenging North Dakota’s abortion ban was canceled Monday as the judge in the case weighs whether to throw out the lawsuit. It was not immediately clear why the trial was canceled. State District Judge Bruce Romanick issued a notice to parties regarding trial saying the Aug. 26-30 trial is canceled and will be removed from the calendar. The notice comes nearly a week after the state and plaintiffs, who include the formerly sole abortion clinic in North Dakota, made their pitches to the judge as to why he should dismiss the two-year-old case, or continue to trial. (Dura, 7/29)

A proposed amendment to New York’s Constitution that’s intended to protect abortion rights might appear on the ballot this fall without any mention of the word “abortion.” That’s partly because of sharp disagreements about what the so-called Equal Rights Amendment would actually do, if passed. The state’s Board of Elections, which is charged with writing easy-to-understand explanations of proposed laws appearing on the ballot, decided Monday that rather than try and interpret the amendment, they would simply repeat its somewhat unclear language in material given to voters. (Izaguirre, 7/29)

Thursday marked what many clinic staff believed could be one of the last days for what has been its normal operations. Soon, an Iowa law will go into effect that prohibits most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, dramatically changing how the clinic cares for its patients. “It's really demoralizing, and actually is such an invasion into the practice of medicine and the patient-physician relationship that really doesn't belong,” said Dr. Sarah Traxler, the OB-GYN overseeing the clinic Thursday and the chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood North Central States. (Ramm, 7/29)

Unlike other abortion-rights initiatives across the country, major reproductive rights groups haven’t backed the effort to restore access in South Dakota. But that hasn’t stopped Dakotans for Health — a ballot question committee behind a measure that is set to appear on the November ballot — from galvanizing voters in the state, where abortion is banned unless the mother’s life is at risk. South Dakota enacted a trigger law, first passed by lawmakers in 2005, after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago. States Newsroom spoke to Dakotans for Health leader Rick Weiland, a Sioux Falls resident who unsuccessfully ran for Congress three times as a Democrat, about the grassroots campaign. (Brown, 7/30)

Since the six-week limit took effect in Florida, the number of people using telemedicine services, while growing, does not appear to be keeping pace with expected demand, given the state’s population. Neither does the number of people traveling for abortions. (Luthra, 7/30)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Readers Weigh In On The Abortion Debate And Ways To Tackle The Opioid Crisis

�鶹Ů�� Health News gives readers a chance to comment on a recent batch of stories. (7/30)

The Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved a blood test intended to detect colon cancer, a product many experts hope will help catch cases of the disease early enough so that they can be more easily treated. The test, called Shield and made by Guardant Health, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based biotech firm, comes with a drawback: It is not as good as a colonoscopy and other tests at detecting precancerous or early stage cancers. But some experts have welcomed it as a way to approach another problem: As effective as colonoscopy is as both a way of finding cancer and removing lesions that could become cancer later on, many people are unwilling to undergo the procedure. (Herper, 7/29)

The US government is throwing its weight behind African production of antiretrovirals as the continent grapples the world’s largest HIV epidemic. The US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief program — known as Pepfar — has committed to expand its purchase of ARVs from local suppliers to cover 2 million African patients, said Stavros Nicolaou, the head of strategic trade at Aspen Pharmacare Holdings Ltd. (Kew, 7/29)

Transgender people are at higher-than-average risk of contracting HIV. And yet, when epidemiologist Diana Tordoff set out to analyze how transmission of the virus might change in the U.S. over the next 10 years with increased testing and preventative PrEP medication, she found there wasn’t enough existing data on trans and nonbinary people to answer the question for those populations. (Gaffney, 7/30)

Semaglutide, the active ingredient in drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic, can help people lose weight — and a new study says it may also help people quit smoking. In the study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine on Monday, researchers found semaglutide was associated with lower risks for tobacco use disorder-related health care measures, including reduced smoking cessation medication prescriptions and counseling. (Moniuszko, 7/29)

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has regained weight and appears to have obesity-related health problems such as high blood pressure and diabetes, and his officials are looking for new medicines abroad to treat them, South Korea’s spy agency told lawmakers Monday. The 40-year-old Kim, known for heavy drinking and smoking, comes from a family with a history of heart problems. Both his father and grandfather, who ruled North Korea before his 2011 inheritance of power, died of heart issues. (Kim, 7/29)

If millions of Americans no longer qualify for a statin or a blood pressure medication based on a new calculator updated to better predict their risk, that could lead to 107,000 more heart attacks and strokes over 10 years, a new study estimates. (Cooney, 7/29)

A study conducted at two large pediatric academic healthcare systems found that three-quarters of antibiotic prescriptions for children with ear infections were longer than recommended, researchers reported last week in the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society. (Dall, 7/29)

Patients of color receive different pain care than white patients, and universities are turning to implicit bias training for clinicians and revamping medical school curricula to help fix the problem. Disparities between racial groups in pain management largely exist due to the widespread, incorrect belief among providers that race is biological rather than a social construct, according to experts. (Devereaux, 7/29)

GSK Plc and Flagship Pioneering Inc. entered a partnership to develop as many as 10 new drugs in a deal that could pay more than $7 billion to firms supported by the venture capital biotech. Flagship, which created mRNA Covid-vaccine maker Moderna Inc., and GSK will jointly put $150 million upfront toward exploring new respiratory and immunology treatments, according to a statement Monday. (Furlong, 7/29)

British drugmaker GSK said on Monday it has agreed to confidentially settle a lawsuit in Illinois that alleged its discontinued heartburn drug Zantac caused cancer, the latest in a series of settlements to end costly litigation. (7/29)

In the next 6 to 10 weeks, hundreds of state and country fairs will take place across the United States, and thousands of Americans will attend agricultural shows, walk through barns, watch dairy cattle be milked, and even observe an animal giving birth. But veterinarians, public health researchers, and scientists are unclear to what extent—if any—the recent explosion in cases of H5N1 avian influenza in dairy cattle will affect animals on exhibition or pose a threat to human health. H5N1 is deadly to poultry, but causes mild to moderate symptoms in the bovine population. So far, humans who have been infected with H5N1 via contact with infected cows have also exhibited mild illness, but case numbers in humans remain low. (Soucheray, 7/29)

There will be a noticeable part of the Minnesota State Fair missing this year.Due to the avian flu, state agricultural industry officials say the Miracle of Birth Center at the fair will not have birthing cows or newborn calves. (7/29)

New York’s plan for confronting bird flu if it begins spreading among people relies heavily on a vast stockpile of flu treatment medicine. But experts worry the stockpile is missing a key tool. New York has only one type of flu antiviral drug, Tamiflu, which might prove less effective than hoped against a pandemic strain of bird flu, some experts say. There is another antiviral that might work, even if Tamiflu doesn’t — a drug called baloxavir marboxil. And yet the state has not stored a single dose of it in case of emergency. (Goldstein, 7/29)

The World Health Organization announced Monday that it has launched an initiative to help accelerate the development of a human bird flu vaccine using messenger RNA (mRNA) technology. The project, which will be led by Argentinian pharmaceutical company Sinergium Biotech, will aim to identify vaccine candidates for manufacturers in low- and middle-income countries, the WHO said. (Kekatos, 7/30)

Bird flu vaccine developer Sinergium Biotech will share its data with manufacturers in low and middle-income countries to help to accelerate a fair rollout if a pandemic occurs, the World Health Organization said on Monday. (Farge, 7/29)

Deer mice, opossums, raccoons, groundhogs, Eastern cottontail rabbits, and Eastern red bats had signs of infection, and isolates from an opossum showed previously unreported viral mutations closely matching the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant circulating in people at the time, which the authors said suggests at least seven recent human-to-animal virus transmission events. The mutations could alter the virus's effects on people. The team also identified two mice on the same day with the same variant, indicating that one mouse infected the other or that they both were infected by the same person. (Van Beusekom, 7/29)

California health officials are urging people who attended the Kern County music festival Lightning in a Bottle to seek medical care if they are experiencing respiratory symptoms or a fever. Authorities have identified five patients with valley fever who attended the six-day event, which was held May 22-27 at Buena Vista Lake, near Bakersfield. Three people have been hospitalized. More than 20,000 people attended the festival. (Rust, 7/29)

Massachusetts senators are set to vote Tuesday on a bill that would allow cities or towns to approve sites that could offer supervised consumption of drugs, marking an 11th-hour push for a provision that surprised House leaders who passed their own opioid-related bill earlier this summer. The provision allowing for so-called overdose prevention centers, more commonly known as safe consumption sites, is part of a larger package released by the Senate on Monday aimed at treating substance abuse. ( Gross, Stout and Laughlin, 7/29)

Faced with a devastating fentanyl crisis, San Francisco Mayor London Breed has increasingly embraced punishment and law enforcement crackdowns to try to stop people from using illicit drugs. But a proposal released Monday would rely on incentives rather than discipline to encourage sobriety. Breed and Supervisor Matt Dorsey on Monday unveiled legislation called “Cash Not Drugs” that would reward some welfare recipients with $100 every week they test negative for illicit drugs. (Angst, 7/29)

The warm, soggy summer across much of the Midwest has produced a bumper crop of wild mushrooms — and a surge in calls to poison control centers. At the Minnesota Regional Poison Center, calls from April through July more than tripled over the same period last year, said Samantha Lee, the center’s director. The center took 90 calls for potential exposures over that period, compared to 26 calls for the same months in 2023. Exposures include people who have had actual or suspected contact with potentially poisonous mushrooms and who may or may not develop symptoms, she said. (Karnowski, 7/29)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: California Lawmakers Debate Sending Local Health Inspectors Into Immigration Facilities

Covid-19, mumps, and chickenpox outbreaks. Contaminated water, moldy food, and air ducts spewing black dust. These health threats have been documented inside privately run immigration detention facilities in California through lawsuits, federal and state audits, and complaints lodged by detainees themselves. But local public health officers who routinely inspect county jails and state prisons say they don’t have the authority under state law to inspect detention centers operated by private companies, including all six federal immigration centers in California. (Sánchez, 7/30)

Private Medicare plans now cover more than half of Medicare beneficiaries, but how well they actually serve people differs from county to county. Medicare enrollees living in communities of color and with high rates of poverty had less access to top-rated Medicare Advantage plans last year than those living in wealthier places that are majority white. (Goldman, 7/30)

Minnesota's health care system has long been recognized as one of the best in the country and a recent study has reinforced that viewpoint. According to a WalletHub study published Monday, Minnesota's health care system is No. 1 in the nation, followed by Rhode Island and South Dakota. The study compared all 50 states and the District of Columbia across three key dimensions: cost, access and outcomes. (Premo, 7/29)

Baltimore Health Commissioner Ihuoma Emenuga, the city’s top health official of fewer than eight months, has been terminated effective immediately. According to a memo sent to the Baltimore City Council and a subsequent news release from Mayor Brandon Scott’s administration, Emenuga, who previously worked for the city in a different capacity, departed her city position Monday. (Opilo, 7/29)

Lurie Children’s Hospital has laid off a small number of employees, the Chicago hospital confirmed to Crain’s. Lurie enacted the recent layoffs after reviewing its budget and identifying opportunities to improve operating efficiency, spokeswoman Julianne Bardele said in a statement. (Davis, 7/29)

After more than a year of contract negotiations and two strikes at one of the region’s largest and busiest hospitals, union-represented nurses at St. Louis University Hospital voted this weekend to ratify a new three-year contract. (Merrilees, 7/29)

Staffing issues are top of mind as New York City hospitals care for patients experiencing a mental health crisis. A generous donation to one health system is helping turn the tide. Black Family Philanthropies, which has a history of donating millions to healthcare in the city, just donated $5 million to pay off the debts of more than 120 staffers in behavioral health at NYC Health + Hospitals. (Carlin, 7/29)

Mercy received the state’s stamp of approval on Monday to build a $650 million hospital campus in Wentzville. Mercy said the project had received a certificate of need from the state, a layer of oversight intended to rein in unnecessary health care spending. Any organization looking to build a new hospital or nursing home in Missouri has to secure approval from the nine-person, state-level panel. (Merrilees, 7/29)

Steward Health Care has delayed a sales hearing for six of its Massachusetts hospitals amid mounting protests over its move to shut down two others and the Healey administration’s decision to accede to the closings. The bankrupt company’s move to postpone Wednesday’s hearing, where a judge was set to rule on the sale of a half dozen Steward hospitals. (Weisman and Fonseca, 7/29)

The “Pepsi challenge” of health care, as one health system executive put it, is on. In the race to test generative AI in medicine, ambient scribes — which listen in to the audio of a visit and turn it into a structured clinical note for the electronic health record — are leading the pack. And to find the right scribe at the right price, health systems are pitting them against each other. (Palmer, 7/30)

You’re less likely to die of cancer today than you were a generation ago. True, you could’ve said the same thing 20 years ago and 40 years ago. But the gains made against cancer during the first two decades of the 21st century are so profound – and so unexpected given other trends that should be leading to more cancer deaths, not fewer – that some experts are talking again about the idea that cancer could be cured. (Mouchard, 7/29)

Errors in diagnosis are relatively common among older people. The reasons are many: older adults may have multiple conditions, take many medications, and illnesses can look very different in older people than they do in younger ones. Older adults may show different symptoms or none at all. And sometimes health care workers assume that whatever is bothering the patient is “because of your age.” All this can lead to older patients being either under-treated or over-treated. (Milne-Tyte, 7/30)

Exposure to wildfire smoke increases the odds of being diagnosed with dementia even more than exposure to other forms of air pollution, according to a landmark study of more than 1.2 million Californians. The study — released Monday at the Alzheimer’s Assn. International Conference in Philadelphia — is the largest and most comprehensive review of the impact of wildfire smoke on brain health to date, according to its authors. (Wigglesworth, 7/29)

When the mayor of Las Vegas, N.M., issued a warning in 2022 to its 13,000 residents, it wasn’t over a fire — they had recently lived through the state’s largest wildfire in its history: Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak. The dire warning was that the city had 30 days of clean water left. The 2022 monsoon rains covered the Gallinas watershed, where cleared trees from the Santa Fe National Forest and ash-covered grounds made for flash-flood conditions. The storms introduced massive amounts of carbon from burned trees and plant life into the streams and reservoirs. Water treatment couldn’t keep up, making their stores undrinkable. (Wolfe and Steckelberg, 7/29)

Around a quarter of adolescent girls who have been in relationships have endured physical or sexual violence, a World Health Organization study said on Tuesday, calling for more prevention actions. The WHO analysis published in the Lancet medical journal was based on surveys from thousands of adolescent girls aged between 15 and 19 from 154 countries and areas. It showed that 24% of them had been subjected to intimate partner violence at least once, with 16% reporting it in the past year. (Farge, 7/29)

Americans have been nervously watching headlines about the spread of avian flu for months. Many wonder if the H5N1 bird flu will develop into a pandemic similar to COVID-19, which has killed more than 7 million people globally. (Abdullah Shihipar, 7/29)

PFAS are known as “forever chemicals” because they persist in the environment and in human bodies for decades. These chemicals have been used to make common items from textiles to adhesives to food packaging to firefighting foams to nonstick cookware. (Erin Brockovich, 7/30)

When it comes to abortion, Americans pause our intolerance of nuance. Three-quarters of my fellow Catholics, recognizing that unborn life is still life, say abortion should be illegal in some cases but legal in others. JD Vance’s opposition to abortion in cases of rape or incest aligns more with official Catholic teaching than do my views. (He has fallen line with Donald Trump’s less-absolutist stance since joining the Republican ticket). But his position horrifies those who don’t believe 10-year-olds should bear their rapist’s child. Including, possibly, Vance’s running mate. (Rich Barlow, 7/30)

Drowning is the No. 1 cause of death among young kids, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported. In 2022, the latest data available, 461 children ages 1 to 4 drowned, an increase of 28 percent from 2019. (Leana S. Wen, 7/30)

Earlier this month, Dr. Bonnie Henry, British Columbia's provincial health officer, attempted to make her province even more of an outlier than it already was in its response to the unprecedented drug crisis. Recognizing that prior harm reduction interventions had failed to bend the curve of the drug crisis, she submitted a report that recommended that British Columbia "enable access to non-prescribed alternatives to unregulated drugs," that is, encourage availability of an unadulterated supply of lethal drugs in retail stores, buyers' clubs, and community centers. (Kevin Sabet, 7/26)