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The US Supreme Court rebuffed the Biden administration in an abortion clash, leaving intact an appeals court decision favoring Texas in a fight over the availability of the procedure in hospital emergency rooms. The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals said Texas, which has a broad abortion ban, wasn’t bound by a Department of Health and Human Services memorandum requiring hospitals to offer the procedure on an emergency basis to protect a mother’s health. The administration had asked the high court to order reconsideration of that ruling. (Stohr, 10/7)

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to review an Alabama ruling that triggered concerns about in vitro fertilization availability by allowing couples to pursue wrongful death lawsuits over the the accidental destruction of frozen embryos. A fertility clinic and hospital had asked the court to review the Alabama Supreme Court decision that a couple, who had a frozen embryo destroyed in an accident, could pursue a lawsuit against them for the wrongful death of their “minor child.” Justices turned down the petition without comment. (10/7)

The Georgia Supreme Court moved to restore the state’s six-week abortion ban Monday, once again severely restricting the procedure as it considers an appeal in a long-running legal challenge to the law. The ruling stays a lower court decision last week that had overturned Georgia’s abortion ban, allowing the procedure to be performed until the 22nd week of pregnancy. The latest decision, from the state’s highest court, takes effect Monday at 5 p.m., making abortions illegal after six weeks of pregnancy, the earliest that fetal cardiac electrical activity can be detected and before many people know they are expecting. (Somasundaram, 10/7)

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, abortion training at medical schools in more than a dozen states with near-total abortion bans has been severely limited. Now some medical students, many of whom attend prestigious schools, have chosen to travel out of state to attend workshops that teach them how to perform a manual vacuum aspiration. It’s a procedure used for patients seeking induced abortions, but also for those facing life threatening pregnancy complications. CNN was invited to a hotel conference room in Philadelphia to witness a training. (10/7)

Dozens of health care facilities in Florida are suspending services and/or preparing to evacuate as Hurricane Milton approaches. On Sunday, Pinellas County – located on the west central Florida coast and including Clearwater and St. Petersburg – issued mandatory evacuation orders for long-term care facilities, assisted living facilities and hospitals in three evacuation zones. The order affects six hospitals, 25 nursing homes and 44 assisted living facilities, totaling about 6,600 patients, according to the order. (Kekatos, 10/7)

Tampa General Hospital, the region’s only Level I Trauma Center, wrote in an 11:30 a.m. Monday update that it has activated its emergency response plan. ... Much like during Helene, those preparations include a central energy plant built to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, supply stores and an “AquaFence” barrier able to withstand up to 15-foot storm surges. (Muoio, 10/7)

Among the Tampa Bay locals who were killed in Hurricane Helene, almost all shared a tragic trait in common: they were over 60 years old. Nearly all of them lived in mandatory evacuation zones, but didn’t leave. Many also had mobility issues, such as needing walkers to get around. Jeff Johnson, the state director for AARP Florida, which advocates for people over the age of 50, said that in addition to physical hurdles, older adults also may have a harder time, emotionally, leaving their homes and not knowing what it’ll look like when they come back. (Mahoney and Garcia, 10/7)

The federal government could be nearing a collapse of its ability to help with major disasters as the second catastrophic hurricane in less than two weeks bears down on Florida. Hurricane Milton, a Category 5 storm whose winds reached 180 mph late Monday, is whirling toward a possible landfall in Tampa Bay just as the main federal disaster programs are facing financial instability amid a series of recent calamities, including Hurricane Helene’s flooding of communities throughout the Southeast. (Frank, 10/7)

The American Hospital Association is calling on the White House to help increase the supply of IV solutions after a massive Baxter International plant was taken offline by Hurricane Helene. Baxter's Marion, N.C., facility — which produces 60% of the IV solutions used daily — was closed due to flooding caused by the hurricane late last month and it is uncertain when the plant will reopen. (DeSilva, 10/7)

The Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule Tuesday requiring water utilities to replace all lead pipes within a decade, a move aimed at eliminating a toxic threat that continues to affect tens of thousands of American children each year. The move, which also tightens the amount of lead allowed in the nation’s drinking water, comes nearly 40 years after Congress determined that lead pipes posed a serious risk to public health and banned them in new construction. (Ajasa and Foster-Frau, 10/8)

The largest regulated water and wastewater utility company in the United States announced Monday that it was the victim of a cyberattack, prompting the firm to pause billing to customers. New Jersey-based American Water — which provides services to more than 14 million people in 14 states and on 18 military installations — said it became aware of the unauthorized activity on Thursday and immediately took protective steps, including shutting down certain systems. The company does not believe its facilities or operations were impacted by the attack and said staffers were working “around the clock” to investigate the nature and scope of the attack. (Shipkowski, 10/7)

Children should spend up to two hours a day outside to reduce their risk of myopia, or nearsightedness, according to a new consensus report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. At least one of those hours should take place during the school day, the report says. Myopia is a condition in which distant objects are blurry but close-up objects look clear. The National Academies report cites research indicating a significant rise in myopia worldwide. (McMahan, 10/7)

A new analysis of acne creams and cleansers found dozens, including popular products like Proactiv and Clearasil, contain high levels of a chemical linked to cancer. The findings confirm some of an earlier study that received criticism for its methods, putting more pressure on the US Food and Drug Administration to take action on products widely used by American teenagers. Researchers tested more than 100 benzoyl peroxide acne products available at major retailers in six states. They found about a third were contaminated with high levels of benzene, a chemical that can cause cancer. (Edney, 10/7)

Panera Bread has settled with the family of an Ivy League student with a heart condition who died after drinking the chain’s highly caffeinated Charged Lemonade drink. Sarah Katz, 21, was a University of Pennsylvania student with a heart condition called long QT syndrome type 1 who avoided energy drinks per her doctors’ recommendations, according to a lawsuit filed last year in Philadelphia. (Chuck, 10/7)

Blood pressure readings may not be accurate unless a person’s arm is positioned correctly, a new study suggests. A comparison of blood pressure readings taken while people held their arms three different ways  — leaning on a surface, resting on the lap or hanging by the side of the body — showed certain positions could lead to a significant increase in systolic pressure, the upper number in a blood pressure reading, according to the study published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine. (Carroll, 10/7)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: A Boy’s Bicycling Death Haunts A Black Neighborhood. 35 Years Later, There’s Still No Sidewalk

It’s been 35 years since John Parker died after a pickup collided with the bike he was riding on Cheek Road in east Durham before school. He was 6. His mother, Deborah Melvin-Muse, doesn’t display photos of him, the second-youngest of six children. His brother’s birthday was the day after the crash — and he hasn’t celebrated it since. ... And Cheek Road, in a predominantly Black neighborhood, still lacks sidewalks for children to safely make their way to the local elementary school. (Rayasam and Clasen-Kelly, 10/8)

Kamala Harris during a Tuesday appearance on “The View” is expected to announce a new policy aimed at helping families care for aging seniors. The vice president will propose establishing a home care benefit through Medicare focused on helping families afford the cost of caring for seniors at home instead of in nursing facilities, according to a senior campaign official granted anonymity to share details of the proposal. The senior official said the proposal would help older Americans age at home and avoid the costs of in-facility care, which can be thousands of dollars more a month than in-home care. The benefit would cover the costs of various home care services, including in-home health aides. (Messerly, 10/8)

Vice President Kamala Harris focuses on health care in the campaign, highlighting threats to ObamaCare and the need for affordable prescription drugs. (Weixel, 10/8)

Vice President Kamala Harris has a Glock. And she has taken it to the shooting range. In a wide-ranging interview that ran on Monday night during a “60 Minutes” election special on CBS News, Ms. Harris revealed more details about her firearm, which she had teased last month in an interview with Oprah Winfrey. “I have a Glock, and I’ve had it for quite some time,” she told her “60 Minutes” interviewer, Bill Whitaker. “Look, Bill, my background is in law enforcement, so there you go.” When he asked if she had fired it, Ms. Harris laughed. “Of course I have,” she said. “At a shooting range. Yes, of course I have.” (Levien, 10/7)

The claim: Former President Donald Trump vowed to stop fentanyl from pouring into the United States and said Vice President Kamala Harris has the opposite approach. "Kamala is so radical she even wants to legalize fentanyl," Trump said Sept. 29 in Erie, Pennsylvania. ... PolitiFact ruling: False. Trump spoke in the present tense as if it is on her presidential to-do list. She hasn’t said that. Trump was referring to a 2019 ACLU questionnaire that asked presidential primary candidates whether they supported decriminalization "of all drug possession for personal use." (Sherman, 10/7)

CVS Health is expected to cut more than 630 employees who report to the company’s headquarters in Woonsocket, according to a letter the company sent to state officials on Monday. Of the 632 terminations, only 153 work at the Woonsocket headquarters or surrounding facilities. The remaining 479 affected employees are “outstationed,” which means they work remotely and report to leaders at the Woonsocket headquarters, according to the company’s Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification notice. (Gagosz, 10/7)

CVS Health told the state of Connecticut on Monday it would be laying off 416 employees linked to the Hartford headquarters of its subsidiary Aetna. (Klein, 10/7)

The Department of Veterans Affairs plans to create a diagnostic code to ensure that veterans with constrictive bronchiolitis, an illness linked to burn pits and other airborne pollutants, can receive a disability rating and related compensation for the condition. But the proposal, published Sept. 12 in the Federal Register, doesn't add any new standards or criteria for evaluating veterans for the difficult-to-diagnose disease, an omission critics say will shortchange veterans. (Kime, 10/7)

Physician compensation continues to rise across most specialties as the talent pool shrinks, furthering a need for employers to get creative to stay ahead of the competition. Hiring organizations are shifting to offer more than just higher salaries to attract clinicians, according to respondents to Modern Healthcare’s 2024 Physician Compensation Survey. (DeSilva, 10/7)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: What’s New And What To Watch For In The Upcoming ACA Open Enrollment Period

It’s that time of year again: In most states, the Affordable Care Act’s annual open enrollment season for health plans begins Nov. 1 and lasts through Jan. 15. Current enrollees who do not update their information or select an alternative will be automatically reenrolled in their current plan or, if that plan is no longer available, into a plan with similar coverage. Last year marked a record enrollment of about 21 million people. This time around, consumers will find a few things have changed. (Appleby, 10/8)

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from Martin Shkreli, who was once dubbed “Pharma Bro” after jacking up the price of a lifesaving drug. Shkreli appealed an order to return $64.6 million in profits he and his former company reaped after monopolizing the market for the medication and drastically increasing its price. His lawyers argued that the money went to his company rather than him personally. The justices did not explain their reasoning, as is typical, and there were no noted dissents. (Whitehurst, 10/7)

A drug compounding industry group on Monday sued the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over its decision to take Eli Lilly’s blockbuster weight loss and diabetes drugs off its list of medicines in short supply last week. The Outsourcing Facilities Association claims the FDA removed Lilly's tirzepatide from the list even though it remains in short supply. (Pierson, 10/7)

The first patient blood samples, just weeks away, will open a new chapter in medicine’s ongoing search for a therapy that converts the body’s own immune system to a cancer-killing machine. (McCook, 10/8)

An organization scouring thousands of existing drugs to see if any can cure hard-to-treat diseases has a powerful new ally: Janet Woodcock, who for decades was one of the most influential figures at the Food and Drug Administration. The group, Every Cure, is led by physician David Fajgenbaum, who has told his own story again and again: When he was a young medical student, he came down with a rare disease that turned his athletic, football-honed body bloated and weak and nearly killed him not once, but five times. He was read last rites until his own research led his doctors to try an existing drug, the transplant medicine sirolimus, which sent his disease into remission. (Herper, 10/7)

The Chicago Department of Public Health issued a warning that attendees of a recent outdoor concert at the popular Salt Shed music venue may have been exposed to rabies-carrying bats. According to the CDPH, the “possible” exposure took place between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. Sept. 12 during the outdoor Goose concert at the venue, located at 1357 N. Elston Ave. The CDPH noted in a release that bats in and around the Chicago area have been found to carry rabies, though not all of them do. (10/7)

A Northern Arizona University freshman dorm infested with bats is causing students to pack up their belongings and move to another building. Now a parent of an NAU student says they are frustrated the school did not address the problem sooner. In early September, NAU says a bat was captured in one of NAU's dorms: Mountain View Hall, and it tested positive for rabies. (Ragas, 10/4)

U.S. health officials are preparing to screen passengers flying in from Rwanda for symptoms of Marburg virus, a severe infection similar to Ebola. “Starting mid-October, airline passengers who have been in Rwanda in the last 21 days will have their travel to the United States rerouted” to one of three airports: Chicago O’Hare, JFK in New York and Washington Dulles in suburban Virginia, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement Monday. (Edwards, 10/7)

Damage to the brainstem could be behind the physical and psychological effects of Long COVID, a new study suggests. Brain scans of 30 Long COVID patients found they had damage to the region of the brainstem associated with breathlessness, fatigue and anxiety, researchers reported Oct. 7 in the journal Brain. (Thompson, 10/8)

Results from an online survey in Denmark describe fatigue and post-exertional malaise as prominent features 2 to 18 months after COVID-19 infections for both mild and severe cases. The study appeared today JAMA Network Open. (Soucheray, 10/7)

More than four years ago, former President Donald Trump’s administration accelerated the development and rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine. The project, dubbed Operation Warp Speed, likely saved millions of lives. But a substantial number of Republican voters now identify as vaccine skeptics — and Trump rarely mentions what’s considered one of the great public health accomplishments in recent memory. ... Instead, on at least 17 occasions this year, Trump has promised to cut funding to schools that mandate vaccines. (Tahir, 10/7)

Pfizer on Monday won a bid in a London court to invalidate two of GSK's patents relating to a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine. The two pharmaceutical giants are among a number of companies in competition for a vaccine for RSV, which typically causes cold-like symptoms but is also a leading cause of pneumonia in toddlers and older adults. (10/7)

Humanity is hitting the upper limit of life expectancy, according to a new study. Advances in medical technology and genetic research — not to mention larger numbers of people making it to age 100 — are not translating into marked jumps in lifespan overall, according to researchers who found shrinking longevity increases in countries with the longest-living populations. “We have to recognize there’s a limit” and perhaps reassess assumptions about when people should retire and how much money they’ll need to live out their lives, said S. Jay Olshansky, a University of Illinois-Chicago researcher who was lead author of the study published Monday by the journal Nature Aging. (Stobbe, 10/7)

A unique peek inside the human brain may help explain how it clears away waste like the kind that can build up and lead to Alzheimer’s disease. Brain cells use a lot of nutrients which means they make a lot of waste. Scientists have long thought the brain has special plumbing to flush out cellular trash, especially during sleep – they could see it happening in mice. But there was only circumstantial evidence of a similar system in people. Now researchers have finally spotted that network of tiny waste-clearing channels in the brains of living people, thanks to a special kind of imaging. (Neergaard, 10/7)

A combination of inflammation and aging, the term describes a simmering form of inflammation—the immune system’s response to a perceived threat—that is chronic and low-grade, and builds stealthily as you age. It is associated with an increased risk of heart attack, cancer, Alzheimer’s and other conditions. Inflammaging happens to everyone to some degree as we age, and some people don’t develop much. But scientists say we should pay closer attention. More research is showing the damage it can cause.  (Janin and McKay, 10/7)

John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on Tuesday for discoveries that helped computers learn more in the way the human brain does, providing the building blocks for developments in artificial intelligence. The award is an acknowledgment of A.I.’s growing significance in the way people live and work. With its ability to quickly make sense of vast amounts of data, machine learning that uses artificial neural networks already has a major role in scientific research, the Nobel committee said, including in physics, where it is used for the creation of “new materials with specific properties.” (Taylor, Metz and Miller, 10/8)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: 'Silence In Sikeston' Podcast: Is There A Cure For Racism?

In the finale of “Silence in Sikeston,” Black residents organize a Juneteenth barbecue. The Department of Public Safety chief encourages officers to attend to build trust. But improving relations between Sikeston’s Black community and the police won’t be easy. Host Cara Anthony discusses the possibility of institutional change in Sikeston. (Anthony, 10/8)

The drumbeat that bird flu is coming closer to humans is growing ever louder. Health officials must step up their game in tracking and preparing for this virus before it spreads further. (Leana S. Wen, 10/8)

In the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, US politicians aren’t just badmouthing vaccines — they’re pushing through laws that undermine them. If the trend continues, we risk losing the layer of protection we enjoy from preventable diseases like the measles. (Lisa Jarvis, 10/7)

In a climate where so much time and energy is spent trying to tackle human disease, Monday’s Nobel Prize in the category of physiology or medicine is a welcome reminder of the value of pursuing research that scratches a scientific itch. Sometimes, that work might lead to a new understanding of human biology. (Lisa Jarvis, 10/8)

October is breast cancer awareness month worldwide, a time for reflection on its past, present and future. It's the most common cancer in the United States; about 310,720 women will be diagnosed with it in 2024 and about 42,250 will die of the disease. As an observer and practitioner of cancer medicine for nearly 60 years, I remember the days of male chauvinism and dogma in its diagnosis and treatment. (Fazlur Rahman, 10/8)

“When will I see the doctor?” Most female doctors have been asked this question many times. It feels like a slight — a failure to recognize the struggle it took to get to where they are, a fight that is far from over once a woman has her medical degree. (David Weill, 10/4)