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Republicans released a party platform on Monday that was much shorter and less detailed than those of the past, sidestepping many policy specifics and the potential internal fights that could have been triggered by a more detailed document. The 16-page platform makes only brief mention of abortion, long a top issue for the GOP. It softens language included in a 2016 version of the document that called for a constitutional amendment making clear that fetuses have due process rights. Instead of calling for a “human life amendment,” the new platform states that the 14th Amendment “guarantees that no person can be denied life or liberty without due process, and that the states are, therefore, free to pass laws protecting those rights.” (Restuccia and McCormik, 7/8)

A small but vocal contingent on the right is frustrated with the new Republican Party platform. There isn’t much they can do about it. Even as anti-abortion groups largely lined up behind former President Donald Trump’s platform on Monday, some prominent and rank-and-file evangelicals criticized the language for backpedaling on the GOP’s longstanding promise to use the federal government to stop abortion. (Messerly and Sentner, 7/8)

President Biden and other Democrats are increasingly focusing their attacks on an aggressive right-wing agenda called Project 2025 that is being pushed by allies of presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump — prompting Trump and his team to lash out in recent days at supporters of the effort. Many Democrats have assessed that the best message for their candidate — whether it is Biden, who is trailing in polls and facing calls to drop out after a damaging debate performance, or another candidate — is to focus on what Trump might do in a second term, particularly as it relates to abortion rights, retribution against his enemies, mass deportations and the environment. (Dawsey and Knowles, 7/8)

Ritu Sidgal volunteered at a hospice in California in high school, reading to patients and offering bedside comfort. After attending college in Missouri to study biology and global health, she applied to medical schools and eventually moved to Tampa, enrolling at the University of South Florida. She won’t graduate until 2027 but she’s already thinking of specializing in women’s reproductive health care as an obstetrician-gynecologist. (Ogozalek, 7/8)

A political committee leading efforts to pass a constitutional amendment on abortion rights raised $293,008 from June 22 through June 28 as it continues gearing up for an election battle. The Floridians Protecting Freedom political committee had raised a total of $38.271 million since being formed in spring 2023, while spending about $22.729 million. Much of the spending went to collecting and verifying petition signatures to put the proposed amendment on the November ballot. (7/8)

Year after year, while Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, Texas legislators passed measures limiting access to abortion — who could have one, how and where. And with the same cadence, they added millions of dollars to a program designed to discourage people from terminating pregnancies. Their budget infusions for the Alternatives to Abortion program grew with almost every legislative session — first gradually, then dramatically — from $5 million starting in 2005 to $140 million after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion. (Jaramillo, Kohler, Chou and Kegu, 7/9)

A solid majority of Americans oppose a federal abortion ban as a rising number support access to abortions for any reason, a new poll finds, highlighting a politically perilous situation for candidates who oppose abortion rights as the November election draws closer. Around 6 in 10 Americans think their state should generally allow a person to obtain a legal abortion if they don’t want to be pregnant for any reason, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. That’s an increase from June 2021, a year before the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to the procedure, when about half of Americans thought legal abortion should be possible under these circumstances. (Fernando and Thomson-Deveaux, 7/9)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: GOP’s Tim Sheehy Revives Discredited Abortion Claims In Pivotal Senate Race

Tim Sheehy, the Republican candidate seeking to unseat Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana and give U.S. Senate control to the GOP, is campaigning on what he calls Tester’s and Democrats’ “extreme” position on abortion. In a televised debate June 8, Sheehy accused Tester and Democrats of voting for “elective abortions up to and including the moment of birth.” That statement prompted Tester to respond: “To say we’re killing babies at 40 weeks is total BS.” (Volz, 7/9)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: If Lawsuit Ends Federal Mandates On Birth Control Coverage, States Will Have The Say

David Engler had been pretty sure he didn’t want children. Then a frustrating school day two years ago helped seal the deal for the now 43-year-old substitute teacher. “It was wild. I had to call the office seven times to get kids pulled out,” he said. “The next day, I called Kaiser and said, ‘I’d like to know how much a vasectomy is.’” (Whitehead, 7/9)

The White House physician says a neurological specialist has only visited President Biden as part of routine physicals, following questions about Biden’s fitness for office. Other visits by the specialist to the White House were to treat military personnel who experience neurological issues related to their service, the White House physician added in a letter issued on Monday. (7/8)

An expert on Parkinson’s disease from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center visited the White House eight times in eight months from last summer through this spring, including at least once for a meeting with President Biden’s physician, according to official visitor logs. The expert, Dr. Kevin Cannard, is a neurologist who specializes in movement disorders and recently published a paper on Parkinson’s. The logs, released by the White House, document visits from July 2023 through March of this year. More recent visits, if there have been any, would not be released until later under the White House’s voluntary disclosure policy. (Baumgaertner and Baker, 7/8)

President Joe Biden is leaning on the credibility of White House physician Kevin O’Connor’s optimistic assessment of his health, but that physician is a family intimate and one-time business associate of the president’s brother. When Biden’s brother Jim was exploring a business venture aimed at securing Veterans Affairs contracts in 2017, O’Connor introduced him to a military-focused medical team and accompanied him to a meeting with a hospital president. (Schreckinger, 7/8)

Senior White House advisers for more than a year have aggressively stage-managed President Biden’s schedule, movements and personal interactions, as they sought to minimize signs of how age has taken a toll on the oldest president in U.S. history. The White House has limited Biden’s daily itinerary and shielded him from impromptu exchanges. Advisers have restricted news conferences and media appearances, twice declining Super Bowl halftime interviews—an easy way to reach millions of voters—and sought to make sure meetings with donors stuck to scripted pleasantries.  (Restuccia, Linskey, Glazer, Ballhaus and Schwartzel, 7/8)

Perhaps nowhere are President Biden’s senior moments hitting closer to home than in places like RiverWalk, a community that skews older in snowbird-friendly Palm Beach County, Florida. The neighborhood is built around the idea that getting old doesn’t mean staying still. Many of the residents keep a busy calendar well into their 80s. And they reject the idea that there should be an age limit for running the country. (Rozsa, 7/8)

A $1 billion gift to Johns Hopkins University from billionaire Mike Bloomberg will make medical school free for most students and increase financial aid for those enrolled in nursing, public health and other graduate programs. In a Monday letter in the Bloomberg Philanthropies annual report, Bloomberg addressed the dual challenges of declining health and education. The gift marks an emphatic endorsement of the value of higher learning at a time when academia increasingly has been under political attack. (Svrluga, 7/8)

Graduates from health administration master's programs most often go on to work for hospitals or health systems, but other sectors also attract their interest. The Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education examined placement of 2022-23 graduates from select residential, non-executive track full-time programs. The analysis found that after hospitals and systems, most graduates went to consulting firms and physician practice management positions. (Broderick, 7/8)

Millions of Americans likely to develop and die from heart disease live in cardiology deserts — areas of the country without a single heart specialist to care for them. New research published Monday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology finds that nearly half of all counties in the U.S. lack a practicing cardiologist. Most of those counties are rural, with residents who tend to be sicker in general with complex medical problems. (Edwards, 7/8)

A federal watchdog has determined that most of the mental health provider listings in Tricare network directories are inaccurate or outdated, a problem that could prevent military service members and families from getting vital behavioral health care. The Government Accountability Office estimated that 85% of listings in the Tricare East Region and 79% in the Tricare West Region had troubles with location, gender of the provider, specialty or subspecialty descriptions, or phone and fax numbers. (Kime, 7/8)

Credit ratings downgrades continue to hit some hospitals and health systems despite their efforts to stabilize finances in a challenging economy. In the first half of 2024, more than 30 hospitals and health systems were downgraded by at least one of the three largest credit rating agencies — Fitch Ratings, Moody's Ratings and S&P Global. The agencies noted challenges such as inflated expenses, including high labor costs, and reimbursement rate negotiations as factors leading to financial stress. (Hudson and Broderick, 7/8)

"Do you have access to a firearm inside or outside of your house?" asked Louise McEvoy, a pediatric emergency department nurse at the hospital, which is part of New Hyde Park, New York-based Northwell Health​​​​​​. Everyone who visits Cohen's emergency department gets that question. It's standard protocol and an outgrowth of one of the first gun research grants the National Institutes of Health awarded in 2020, the year after Congress ended an effective ban it placed federally funded gun violence research in 1996 because of concerns it aided gun control. (McAuliff, 7/8)

The cyberattack on software firm CDK Global that forced U.S. car dealerships to break out pen and paper to do business is putting a spotlight on other sectors critically reliant on just a handful of vendors. Airlines, banks and healthcare providers all use a handful of niche software providers—many of which have been dominant for decades—for key functions such as booking flights, processing payments and managing patient data. (Lin, 6/29)

A pair of federal government officials resigned from board positions at the Coalition for Health AI, an industry group aiming to create artificial intelligence standards for healthcare. Dr. Brian Anderson, CEO of CHAI, said in a LinkedIn post on Friday that the Food and Drug Administration's Troy Tazbaz and the Office for the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology's Micky Tripathi have resigned as board members of the coalition. (Turner, 7/8)

More than half of people surveyed would feel just as safe getting hospital-level care at home as they would in a facility, according to the University of Southern California’s Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. Healthcare systems across the country are placing big bets on hospital-at-home programs, pushing access to more rural communities and lobbying state Medicaid programs to reimburse for the service. (Eastabrook, 7/8)

Healthcare provider Ardent Health is targeting a valuation of about $3.15 billion in its initial public offering, it said on Monday, as the U.S. capital market continues to run hot by attracting new entrants. (7/8)

Purdue Pharma's creditors sought permission from a U.S. bankruptcy court on Monday to sue the company's wealthy owners, arguing that the litigation can serve as both a negotiating tool and a fallback option as the OxyContin maker re-starts talks on a bankruptcy settlement. Purdue is going back to the drawing board to negotiate a comprehensive settlement of lawsuits against it and its Sackler family owners alleging that the company's deceptive marketing of OxyContin spurred an opioid addiction crisis in the U.S. A U.S. Supreme Court decision last month upended a previous bankruptcy deal. (Knauth, 7/8)

Similac baby formula maker Abbott is expected to face a trial on Monday over claims that its formula for preterm infants used in neonatal intensive care units causes a potentially deadly bowel disease, the second trial out of hundreds of similar lawsuits in the United States. Lawyers for the company and for Illinois resident Margo Gill will make their opening statements to jurors in St. Louis, Missouri, and the trial is expected to last most of the rest of the month. Gill alleges in the lawsuit that her premature infant child developed necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) as a result of being fed Abbott's products for premature babies. (Pierson, 7/8)

The researchers who conducted the analysis also found that compared with people on Ozempic, those on Mounjaro were 2.5 times more likely to lose at least 10% of their initial weight and more than three times as likely to lose at least 15% of their weight during their first year on the medications. The findings were published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. (Kaplan, 7/8)

In a long-awaited study, patients in Australia will soon receive an IV infusion designed to transform their own immune cells into swarms of cancer-fighting drones. The trial, announced on Tuesday by Interius Biotherapeutics, will be the first to test what’s known technically as in vivo CAR-T therapy. Researchers have long hoped the approach could provide a potentially cheaper, safer, and more scalable version of the cell therapies that are curative for some blood cancer patients but remain out of reach for many. (Mast, 7/9)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: From Dr. Oz To Heart Valves: A Tiny Device Charted A Contentious Path Through The FDA

In 2013, the FDA approved an implantable device to treat leaky heart valves. Among its inventors was Mehmet Oz, the former television personality and former U.S. Senate candidate widely known as “Dr. Oz.” In online videos, Oz has called the process that brought the MitraClip device to market an example of American medicine firing “on all cylinders,” and he has compared it to “landing a man on the moon.” (Hilzenrath and Hacker, 7/9)

Federal officials suspect that live bird markets in San Francisco may be the source of bird flu virus in area wastewater samples. (Rust, 7/4)

The bird flu strain found in cows in the United States is not easily transmitted through the air among ferrets, a new study shows, although the scientist who led the work said it had shown some ability to spread this way. Ferrets are considered to be the best small mammal for studying influenza virus infection and transmission, and are often used to inform assessments of the public health risks of emerging viruses. (Rigby, 7/8)

Nearly 1.8 million chickens will be killed after bird flu was detected at an egg-laying operation in Weld County, a major resurgence on a commercial farm of the disease that has already seen more than 6 million birds culled. Gov. Jared Polis verbally declared a disaster declaration for the facility over the long holiday weekend. The move activates the state’s emergency operations plan and makes additional resources available to respond to the outbreak. (Ingold, 7/9)

The COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdowns harmed the mental health of Canadian and US youth, exacerbating depression, anxiety, and eating disorders among certain groups, according to a trio of new studies published in JAMA journals. (Van Beusekom, 7/8)

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have published new findings that show an experimental cancer drug developed by a now-bankrupt biotech can suppress the virus in lung tissue. In a July 3 article in Science Translational Medicine, the UCSD team established that levels of damage-causing immune cells called myeloid cells are raised in the lungs of people with COVID-19 and other infections, like methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). (Floersh, 7/9)

A woman incarcerated at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla died Saturday during a statewide heat wave and prisoner advocates are blaming her death on heat exhaustion. The woman was hospitalized on July 4 and died two days later, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson Mary Xjimenez said Monday afternoon. ... Advocates with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners faulted extreme temperatures inside the prison for the woman’s death. (Mishanec, 7/8)

A blistering heat wave is believed to have killed four people in the Portland, Ore., area, officials said on Monday, and is expected to push temperatures into the triple digits this week across the Western United States, from Washington to Arizona. The medical examiner’s office in Multnomah County, Ore., which includes Portland, said that heat was suspected in three deaths in the county between Friday and Sunday, after record temperatures scorched the region. A fourth person, who was transported to a Portland hospital from outside the county, also died from an illness that was believed to be heat-related. (Fortin and Wolfe, 7/8)

Heat accumulates over time in people’s bodies, and the risk of a heart attack, heatstroke or other medical ailment often rises over time. Some experts said medical risks due to heat often trail behind the rise in temperatures — but spike as the days of risk add up. “Usually you see deaths from heat waves not from the first day, but on the second and third day,” said Dr. Lisa Patel, a clinical associate professor who practices as a pediatrician at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health. (Bush, 7/8)

Santa Clara County health officials are urging members of the public to review their immunization records after a person with measles visited the area last week. The person, who lives in another state, traveled to three locations in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties while contagious, according to the Santa Clara County Public Health Department. (Green, 7/8)

Amy Mangan was hopping between pillows and sofa cushions with her two sons, pretending the living room floor of their New Jersey home was boiling lava, when she got a phone call telling her to drive to Boston right away. ... It was the first so-called “partial heart transplant” in New England, a potentially life-saving cutting-edge operation designed specifically for children, primarily for valve defects. (Saltzman, 7/8)

The 988 suicide hotline has offered 24/7 crisis care to callers nationwide for almost two years, but answer rates still vary widely in the West. In Wyoming, answer rates for the three-digit hotline hovered at 90% last year, according to a new report from mental health group Inseparable. Angela Kimball, chief advocacy director for Inseparable, said that number nearly doubled in the past few years. The organization lists 90% as its target response rate. (Hanna Merzbach, 7/8)

Madhu Vulimiri, deputy director of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services’ Division of Child and Family Well-Being, says summer is often the “hungriest time of year” for food-insecure households. It can be an especially harsh season, she said, for low-income families that rely on the National School Lunch Program, which provides free or reduced-cost meals to more than 900,000 students in North Carolina. The meals stop when public schools adjourn for the summer, leaving many children at risk of going undernourished over the long break. (Baxley, 7/9)

Lone star ticks used to be found mostly in the Southeastern United States, but they are on the move — and their numbers are growing. They’re becoming more and more common in Northern states, and even parts of Canada, where they were once scarce. (Roberts, 7/8)

A study published Monday in Nature Microbiology bolsters a growing body of research that suggests an unlikely path to more objective autism diagnoses: the gut microbiome. After analyzing more than 1,600 stool samples from children ages 1 to 13, researchers found several distinct biological “markers” in the samples of autistic children. Unique traces of gut bacteria, fungi, viruses and more could one day be the basis of a diagnostic tool, said Qi Su, a researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a lead author of the study. (Rosenbluth, 7/8)

Dr. Rod Passman, cardiologist and professor of medicine at Northwestern Medicine. "It empowers patients to get involved in their health care. It allows them to understand lifestyle choices may impact their health. And from my perspective, it allows me to monitor my patients long term, remotely, no matter where they are in the world, to understand what's going on with their heart rhythm, simply by doing an EKG from the watch itself," Passman told CBS News. (Barnett and Moniuszko, 7/8)

More than 2,000 pounds of frozen chicken meals are being recalled nationwide for risk of listeria poisoning. Al-Safa US has recalled 2,010 pounds of imported frozen ready-to-eat chicken products that may be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, according to a notice shared Friday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). (Walrath-Holdridge, 7/8)

In the two years since Roe v. Wade was overturned, women in Texas have been robbed of their freedoms. They are understandably scared — and we physicians are too. (Kim D. Vernon and Anita Beasley, 7/8)

Talking about gender understandably brings up a lot of feelings. We’re having heated discussions around bathroom bills, gender-affirming medical care and transgender athletes. Politicians opine about the dangers of “gender ideology” in schools and children being “mutilated and sterilized.” Others have decried the rise in adolescents identifying as transgender and nonbinary as a “social contagion,” likening gender diversity to a disease. (Jack Turban, 7/8)

Nonprofit hospitals and health systems recognize that their tax-exempt status comes with the responsibility to deliver on their mission to care for the communities they serve. Reflective of that responsibility, those organizations provided nearly $130 billion in total benefits to their communities in 2020, based on the most recent data available. That’s a $20 billion increase from the prior year despite it being during one of the most significant and challenging periods in healthcare history. (Sister Mary Haddad and Rick Pollack, 7/9)

Late last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) quietly introduced a regulation that may be one of the most important shifts in how non-profit and for-profit U.S. institutions, both at home and abroad, conduct future medical and public health research. It represents an erosion of personal medical choice and threatens to undermine the public's trust in scientific investigations in biomedicine. (Tom Nicholson & Jay Bhattacharya, 7/8)

Neurological diseases are now the leading cause of poor health and disability worldwide. An estimated 3.4 billion people, or 40% of the world’s population, are affected by neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, stroke, migraine, depression, anxiety, neonatal encephalopathy, and more. Efforts to expand research that can lead to new and more effective treatments for neurological diseases are sorely needed. So are new strategies to address the many unique challenges that often limit progress in developing therapies for these diseases. (Bruce Leuchter, 7/9)