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The Biden administration launched an initiative Wednesday that it describes as a nationwide call to increase training on and access to life-saving opioid overdose reversal medications, dubbed the Challenge to Save Lives from Overdose. (Christensen, 3/13)

Pharmaceutical interests lost a closely watched battle over the federal drug discount program on Tuesday when a federal appeals court ruled that Arkansas can block manufacturers from limiting the availability of discounted drugs at certain pharmacies. (Bettelheim, 3/13)

Senior federal officials met with a wide array of healthcare company and trade group executives Tuesday as they urged UnitedHealth Group and other insurance companies to do more to aid providers harmed by the ongoing Change Healthcare outage. UnitedHealth Group — which operates Change Healthcare through its Optum subsidiary and sells insurance through its UnitedHealthcare subsidiary — and the rest of the industry can do more to mitigate cash flow problems arising from a cyberattack that has disrupted healthcare operations for weeks, the White House, the Health and Human Services Department and other authorities said during the meeting, according to an HHS news release. (Berryman, 3/12)

A central question that has emerged since a cyberattack on a UnitedHealth Group subsidiary is how the strike against a single company has wrought such chaos across an entire industry. (Reed, 3/13)

President Biden’s reelection campaign launched an effort in battleground states this week to hit former President Trump over his threats to Social Security and Medicare, the campaign first told The Hill. The campaign will hold more than 13 press conferences through Friday across key swing states with local elected officials and seniors, all focused on protecting entitlement programs. The events will take place in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.; Harrisburg, Pa.; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Milwaukee; Madison, Wisc.; Lansing, Mich.; Las Vegas and Phoenix. (Gangitano, 3/12)

Donald Trump has offered a new way to win over older voters: suggesting that the government gut Medicare and Social Security spending. While calling in to CNBC’s Squawk Box on Monday, the former president brought up the idea of cutting  “entitlements” such as Social Security and Medicaid. (Oamek, 3/11)

Fueled by a distrust of the CDC’s handling of Covid-19 and the recommendations it made on measures like masking and vaccines, many conservatives want the agency dismantled — and hope a second Trump administration could make it happen. Their proposed approach, outlined in the 2025 Presidential Transition Project offered by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, would drastically reduce the CDC’s size by splitting it in two: One agency responsible for public health surveillance work, like data collection on outbreaks, and another responsible for “limited” public health recommendations — with a strict firewall between them. (Cirruzzo, 3/11)

Former President Donald Trump has been laser-focused on the abortion views of his potential VP picks, viewing the issue as a potential vulnerability for Republicans. In particular, he asked campaign aides and club members what they thought of the vocal anti-abortion-rights views of Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina. (Burns, 3/13)

Not all viral attacks are damaging. But in 2020, the Biden campaign found that the “Sleepy Joe” storyline was — and came up with a plan to fight back. (Issenberg, 3/12)

Federal courts moved Tuesday to make it harder to file lawsuits in front of judges seen as friendly to a point of view, a practice known as judge shopping that gained national attention in a major abortion medication case. The new policy covers civil suits that would affect an entire state or the whole country. It would require a judge to be randomly assigned, even in areas where locally filed cases have gone before a single judge. (Whitehurst, 3/12)

Federally funded family planning centers in Texas must receive parental consent before prescribing birth control to teenagers, an appeals court ruled Tuesday, partially upholding a decision from a lower court. (Luthra, 3/12)

Hundreds of women in the United States die from complications related to pregnancy, childbirth and the time after giving birth each year, and the country’s high maternal death rate makes it an outlier among developed nations. But a new study suggests that maternal mortality rates in the US may be lower and more stable than federal data suggests – though still very high. (McPhillips and Howard, 3/13)

A new Mississippi law will allow earlier Medicaid coverage for pregnant women in an effort to improve health outcomes for mothers and babies in a poor state with the nation’s worst rate of infant mortality. The “presumptive eligility” legislation signed Tuesday by Republican Gov. Tate Reeves will become law July 1. It says Medicaid will pay for a pregnant woman’s outpatient medical care for up to 60 days while her application for the government-funded insurance program is being considered. (Pettus, 3/13)

The number of children globally who died before their fifth birthday dropped to a record low of 4.9 million in 2022, but that still represents one death every six seconds, according to new United Nations estimates. While the mortality rate for under-5s has roughly halved since 2000, the world is still behind in the goal of reducing preventable deaths in that age group by 2030, and progress has slowed since 2015, the report, released on Wednesday, found. (3/12)

In a stunning reversal of decades of progress, global life expectancy at birth fell 1.6 years from 2019 to 2021, with 16 million of 131 million total deaths in 2020 and 2021 directly or indirectly attributable to COVID-19, reveals one of the most comprehensive studies of its kind published yesterday in The Lancet. (Van Beusekom, 3/12)

Covid was declared a national emergency on March 13, 2020. Even as the threat of severe illness and death has faded, the pandemic’s effects linger. (Bosman, 3/13)

Pieces of the COVID virus can lurk in our blood and tissue for almost two years after the initial illness has vanished, a discovery that might offer clues to the mystery of lingering post-infection disability, according to new research from UC San Francisco. (Krieger, 3/12)

The nation’s top public health agency is expanding a program that tests international travelers for COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention program asks arriving international passengers to volunteer to have their noses swabbed and answer questions about their travel. The program operates at six airports and on Tuesday, the CDC said it was adding two more — Chicago’s O’Hare and Miami. (Stobbe, 3/12)

In addition to preventing pneumococcal disease, pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs) are associated with some protection against viral respiratory tract infections (RTIs), according to a systematic literature review published yesterday in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. (Dall, 3/12)

Medical and nursing school graduates' training issues during the COVID-19 pandemic could lead to major safety challenges in 2024, according to nonprofit patient safety organization ECRI. About 400,000 new nurses passed their licensing examination over the course of the pandemic as the industry grappled with a lack of mentors and training programs, according to the National Council of State Boards of Nursing. ECRI worries inexperienced, ill-prepared clinicians could contribute to cases of preventable patient harm. (Devereaux, 3/12)

Nursing home staffing mandates in three states could be a harbinger of the difficulties ahead for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services when it implements a federal staffing mandate. Illinois, Rhode Island and New York paused penalties for nursing homes that violate state staffing mandates as the governors feared the cost of compliance could force nursing homes to limit patient access or close their doors. Their experiences point to problems CMS could encounter carrying out a federal staffing mandate, but the agency is adamant its final rule will be workable for nursing homes. (Eastabrook, 3/12)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Concerns Grow Over Quality Of Care As Investor Groups Buy Not-For-Profit Nursing Homes 

Shelly Olson’s mother, who has dementia, has lived at the Scandia Village nursing home in rural Sister Bay, Wisconsin, for almost five years. At first, Olson said, her mother received great care at the facility, then owned by a not-for-profit organization, the Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society. Then in 2019, Sanford Health — a not-for-profit, tax-exempt hospital system — acquired the nursing home. The covid-19 pandemic struck soon after. From then on, the facility was regularly short of staff, and residents endured long wait times and other care problems, said Olson, a registered nurse who formerly worked at the facility. (Meyer, 3/13)

Steward Health Care’s Massachusetts hospitals are on the brink of financial disaster. But in many important ways, Steward’s troubles are just a symptom of a larger crisis engulfing the entire industry. (Chesto, 3/12)

Rob Bart remembers what it felt like, the moment of discovery. As an intern at Duke University Medical Center in the ’90s, he’d sometimes be tasked with poring through a patient’s medical history to uncover the cause of their latest hospitalization. Back then, the stacks of paper records could tower 18 inches tall. (Palmer and Ross, 3/13)

Don’t be surprised if your doctors start writing you overly friendly messages. They could be getting some help from artificial intelligence. New AI tools are helping doctors communicate with their patients, some by answering messages and others by taking notes during exams. It’s been 15 months since OpenAI released ChatGPT. Already thousands of doctors are using similar products based on large language models. One company says its tool works in 14 languages. (Johnson, 3/13)

A bill to support healthcare workers struggling with burnout, stress and other work-related mental health problems advanced in Congress on a unanimous subcommittee vote Tuesday. The Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Reauthorization Act of 2024, named after a New York physician who died by suicide in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, authorizes five years of grant programs, building on the previous, shorter-term legislation, which expires at the end of the year. (McAuliff, 3/12)

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) poured some cold water on former President Trump’s recent comments about launching another effort to repeal and replace the 2010 Affordable Care Act, telling reporters Tuesday the fight over the law seems “largely over.” McConnell said he would not weigh in directly on the “development” of Trump’s policy agenda and acknowledged the possibility that Republicans would tackle health care reform if Trump can come up with a viable policy alternative. (Bolton, 3/12)

In interviews this week, Democrats sketched out their top priorities: The House-passed tax deal; a rail safety bill responding to the disaster in East Palestine, Ohio; cannabis banking legislation, a new farm bill, a package of community health center funding and action to lower drug prices; and a new FAA bill. (Everett, 3/12)

US Senator Marc Rubio (R-FL) yesterday sent a letter to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Mandy Cohen, MD, MPH, expressing his concerns about the CDC's proposed guidelines recommending the use of doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis (doxy-PEP) to reduce sexually transmitted infections (STIs). (Dall, 3/12)

Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., led several senators in a letter Wednesday demanding an audit of Medicare after reports of massive fraud emerged. (Johnson, 3/13)

A team of health experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention arrived in Chicago on Tuesday as officials identified three new measles cases amid a flare-up of cases at a migrant shelter in the city's Pilsen neighborhood. The measles cases at the shelter have led to a massive response—and strong encouragement from health officials for vaccination. The city's health department on Monday reported that, along with help from other area health officials and health care providers, it had "successfully vaccinated more than 900 shelter residents with the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine." Those newly vaccinated shelter residents are to stay at the shelter for 21 days. (Mole, 3/12)

Measles has made its way to the High Country. Coconino County Health and Human Services said on Monday that it has one confirmed measles case and one probable case in the county. Officials didn’t say who the patients are or where they are from. (Baker, 3/11)

The Broward County School District said the outbreak of measles at one of its elementary schools is officially over. In an email to the Miami Herald last Friday, the district's communications officer wrote that the 21-day infectious period at Manatee Bay Elementary in Weston ended last week. (DiMattei, 3/12)

Passengers who travelled on a flight to Dublin last weekend have been urged to contact the health authorities after a case of measles was confirmed. It is the third confirmed case of measles in Ireland this year, the Health Service Executive (HSE) has said. The Etihad Airways flight from Abu Dhabi touched down in the Irish capital at 6.30am on Saturday. (Black, 3/12)

Measles seems poised to make a comeback in America. Two adults and two children staying at a migrant shelter in Chicago have gotten sick with the disease. A sick kid in Sacramento, California, may have exposed hundreds of people to the virus at the hospital. Three other people were diagnosed in Michigan, along with seven from the same elementary school in Florida. As of Thursday, 17 states have reported cases to the CDC since the start of the year. (For comparison, that total was 19, plus the District of Columbia, for all of 2023, and just 6 for 2022.) “We’ve got this pile of firewood,” Matthew Ferrari, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State, told me, “and the more outbreaks that keep happening, the more matches we’re throwing at it.” (Engber, 3/12)

Governor Gavin Newsom’s mental health bond measure Proposition 1 continues to hang on to its narrow lead, prompting leaders of the opposition movement to concede likely defeat on Tuesday. The measure, which requires a simple majority to pass, was supported by 50.4% of voters and opposed by 49.6% as of Tuesday afternoon’s vote update. “We almost took down the bear, but it looks like we will fall short. Today, as the principal opponents of Proposition 1, we concede that it is almost certain to pass,” said Californians Against Proposition 1 in a Tuesday morning statement. (Harter, 3/12)

Arkansas will no longer allow drivers to use an “X” for their gender on driver’s licenses, state regulators said Tuesday, rolling back a policy that was inclusive to nonbinary people. The Arkansas Department of Finance and Administration said the changes are being made to “safeguard” state IDs. The agency also announced it will make it more difficult for transgender people to change the gender listed on their ID. (Robertson, 3/12)

The Uvalde, Tex., police chief, who was not present the day a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School, announced his resignation Tuesday morning, five days after an investigator hired by the city defended police officers’ response to the shooting in a report that drew fury from many of the victims’ families. Police Chief Daniel Rodriguez, who was away on vacation during the 2022 shooting, said he will step down April 6, after 26 years on the force. (Kaur, 3/12)

Six emergency medical districts in Missouri will soon distribute an opioid addiction medication as part of a state-funded pilot program. EMS workers across the state are receiving training on how to give overdose victims a dose of buprenorphine, which manages cravings and withdrawal symptoms, after reviving them from an overdose with the overdose reversal drug naloxone. (Fentem, 3/12)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: West Virginia City Once Battered By Opioid Overdoses Confronts ‘Fourth Wave’

From 2006 through 2014, more than 81 million painkiller pills were shipped to this city and surrounding rural Cabell County. The arrival of prescription opioids onto seemingly every block of Huntington, a city of about 46,000 people, augured the first wave of an overdose crisis. Heroin followed, then fentanyl. Residents remember Aug. 15, 2016, as the darkest day because on that afternoon and evening, 28 people overdosed in the city. But Huntington had shouldered collective trauma before. (Sisk, 3/13)

On Sept. 8, 2017, Craig Ridley, an inmate at Florida Department of Corrections’ Reception and Medical Center in Lake Butler for nine years, called his sister, Diane Ridley-Gatewood, for one of their regular talks. This time, he told her he was afraid for his life after filing a complaint against a prison guard who threatened him, she recalled. “Craig, if they start beating you,” she advised him, “you need to get into a fetal position so they won’t hit your internal organs.” Hours later, around 3:20 a.m., two corrections officers hurt 62-year-old Ridley so badly he was paralyzed from the neck down. (Neary, 3/11)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Secret Contract Aims To Upend Landmark California Prison Litigation 

California commissioned an exhaustive study of whether its prisons are providing sufficient mental health care, an effort officials said they could use to try to end a 34-year-old federal lawsuit over how the state treats inmates with mental illness. But corrections officials won’t disclose basic details of the now-stalled study — even the cost to taxpayers for two consulting firms and more than two dozen national experts retained to examine the issue in 2023. State lawyers cited attorney-client privilege and ongoing litigation in denying �鶹Ů�� Health News’ public records requests for the information. Independent legal experts questioned the blanket denials. (Thompson, 3/13)

More than 11% of high school seniors report using delta-8 THC — a compound closely related to the psychoactive chemical in marijuana that’s legal in many states thanks to a loophole in the 2018 farm bill — according to a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study, led by researchers at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, is one of the first to offer a nationwide snapshot of teenage use of delta-8, a little-researched cannabis product with psychoactive effects that has grown in popularity in recent years. (Syal, 3/12)

A New Mexico man has died from plague in the state's first human fatality since 2020, according to health officials. The man lived in Lincoln County -- located in the southeastern part of the state -- and was hospitalized from the disease before dying, the New Mexico Department of Health said in a press release last week. Plague is treatable with commonly available antibiotics and the odds of full recovery are higher if a patient seeks medical care early, according to the CDC. (Kekatos, 3/12)

A man was hospitalized with worsening migraines only to find out they were caused by parasitic tapeworm larvae in his brain — and researchers believe he was infected by eating undercooked bacon. The unidentified 52-year-old American man consulted doctors about changes in his usual migraines over four months, according to a study in the American Journal of Case Reports published Thursday. The migraines became more frequent, severe and unresponsive to medication. (Itoh, 3/12)

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have built a soft, adhesive patch capable of turning throat movements into speech. The patch, written about in a paper published in Nature Communications on Tuesday, is made out of a material that converts motion into electricity. This material, developed by the UCLA team in 2021, could be a game-changer for sensors and wearables limited by their power sources. (Lawrence, 3/12)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: Listen To The Latest '�鶹Ů�� Health News Minute' 

This week on the �鶹Ů�� Health News Minute: Some providers are saving penicillin for pregnant patients amid a shortage of the drug, which is used to treat syphilis, and why bigger hearing aids might be better. (3/12)

People with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are at increased risk for premature death and other adverse health outcomes, but a large study out of Sweden suggests that treating the disorder with medication can help reduce the overall mortality risk for patients. (McPhillips, 3/12)

The Food and Drug Administration is expected to approve the first medicine developed specifically to treat the serious liver disease known as MASH as soon as this week. The pill, called resmetirom, is made by Madrigal Pharmaceuticals. (Feuerstein, 3/12)

Merck & Co said on Wednesday it plans to conduct clinical trials testing its human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine Gardasil 9 to evaluate the efficacy and safety of a single-dose regimen compared to the approved three-dose regimen. The company said it plans to conduct two separate trials testing Gardasil 9 in men and women 16-26 years old to examine whether a single dose of the vaccine provides comparable long-term protection when compared with the approved three-dose regimen. (3/13)

The news last week that a Phase 3 trial of Amylyx Pharmaceuticals’ amyotrophic lateral sclerosis drug — marketed as Relyvrio — failed to benefit patients compared to placebo hit the ALS patient community hard. (Merelli, 3/12)

A federal appeals court on Tuesday revived a lawsuit by a whistleblower who accused McKesson of providing drug pricing tools to doctors for free, to induce them to buy drugs from the company. (Stempel, 3/12)

German drugmaker Boehringer Ingelheim was accused in a federal lawsuit in Boston on Wednesday of improperly submitting patents to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to delay generic competition and inflate prices for its lung disease drugs Combivent Respimat and Spiriva Respimat. (Brittain, 3/6)

Sorrento Therapeutics may continue its Chapter 11 case in Texas, a U.S. judge ruled Monday, rejecting arguments that the pharmaceutical company manipulated bankruptcy venue rules by claiming a just-opened P.O. box as a subsidiary's primary address. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston, Texas, said at a hearing on Monday that the U.S. Department of Justice had waited too long before arguing that the case should be transferred to Delaware, where Sorrento was incorporated, or San Diego, California, where it was headquartered. (Knauth, 3/11)

Managing a chronic complex disease is just that, chronic and complex. Accessing medication to treat the disease should be simple. Increasingly, patients are experiencing challenges accessing medications prescribed by their physician due to a health insurer practice called “copay accumulators.” (Marissa Shackleton, 3/11)

The recent spate of Walgreens closures in Boston has understandably spurred a lot of discussion and concern about the future of pharmacies in the city — particularly in underserved neighborhoods. As an independent pharmacist, I believe it is clear more needs to be done to ensure the continued presence of trusted neighborhood drug stores — particularly when it comes to recent health care law changes. (Michael Wilson, 3/11)

Over the past year, I have watched many children die of measles. In the final stages, little lungs, filled with fluid and racked with inflammation, struggle for oxygen. The victims breathe faster and faster, gasping for air until, exhausted, they stop. (Paul Law, 3/12)

A major drug manufacturer recently replaced its popular, branded inhaler, Flovent, with a cheaper generic version. The generic is exactly the same as the more expensive Flovent. Great news for people with asthma? Think again. (Kenneth Mendez, 3/11)

In December 2017, when I was 11, I was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a rare bone cancer. I was one of the lucky ones—the tumor in my right femur had not spread to other parts of my body. My doctor assured me that my treatment would be as straightforward as it could be. (Gillian Bomi Okimoto, 3/12)

Consider shopping for cereal in the grocery store. Buyers easily know how many grams of sugar and calories are in a serving, as well as how much the box costs, before they get to the checkout line. Yet in the U.S. health care market, this often isn’t the case. Prices are both high and highly variable as well as difficult to observe. (Benjamin Chartock, 3/13)

In Tennessee, living under the nation's most extreme abortion ban, it's become clear that protecting the right to contraception is essential. Introducing the Tennessee Contraceptive Freedom Act (Senate Bill 1804/House Bill 1943) is our commitment to ensuring every Tennessean can make decisions about starting a family on their terms, without government interference. (Charlene Oliver and Gloria Johnson, 3/12)

While Congress passed the PACT Act in 2022 to strengthen the care and benefits for affected veterans, even this landmark legislation has room for improvement. Fortunately, the Biden administration identified an important opportunity and acted on it. Late last month, the Department of Veterans Affairs announced it is speeding up eligibility for the PACT Act's expanded medical care by eliminating the phased-in implementation called for in the legislation. (3/12)

Drug overdoses have claimed more than one million lives in the U.S. since 1999, most tied to illicit opioids such as heroin and the nonmedical use of fentanyl. Although people from all walks of life die each day from overdoses, poverty stands out as a driver of this staggering toll. The risk of dying from an overdose is 36 percent higher among people living at or below the poverty line, compared with people living at five times that line, a typical middle class income. (Hannah L. F. Cooper et al, 3/12)