First Edition: April 8, 2024

KFF Health News: Ten Doctors On FDA Panel Reviewing Abbott Heart Device Had Financial Ties With Company
When the FDA recently convened a committee of advisers to assess a cardiac device made by Abbott, the agency didn’t disclose that most of them had received payments from the company or conducted research it had funded — information readily available in a federal database. One member of the FDA advisory committee was linked to hundreds of payments from Abbott totaling almost $200,000, according to a database maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services. (Hilzenrath and Hacker, 4/8)

KFF Health News: Rising Complaints Of Unauthorized Obamacare Plan-Switching And Sign-Ups Trigger Concern
Federal and state regulators aren’t doing enough to stop the growing problem of rogue health insurance brokers making unauthorized policy switches for Affordable Care Act policyholders, say consumers, agents, nonprofit enrollee assistance groups, and other insurance experts “We think it’s urgent and it requires a lot more attention and resources,” said Jennifer Sullivan, director of health coverage access for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. (Appleby, 4/8)

KFF Health News: Journalists Assess The Risks Of Bird Flu And The Impacts Of Medicaid 'Unwinding'
KFF Health News and California Healthline staff made the rounds on national and local media this week to discuss their stories. Here’s a collection of their appearances. (4/6)

The Washington Post: Solar Eclipse Safety Tips To Protect Your Eyes While Viewing The Sun 
You have to wear eclipse glasses at all times when any part of the sun is visible. But there is an exception: Do not wear eclipse glasses during the brief period of “totality,” when the sun’s face is completely blocked by the moon, leaving only the glowing solar corona. It is not safe to look at the partially eclipsed sun through a camera without a specially designed solar filter. The same goes for binoculars or a telescope. Doing so “will instantly cause severe eye injury,” NASA warns. The exception, again, is during the brief period of totality. (Achenbach, 4/5)

Modern Healthcare: How The Solar Eclipse Affects Texas, Indiana, Ohio Hospitals
Hospitals in the path of Monday's solar eclipse started planning more than a year ago to limit disruptions to their operations while also serving up a little fun for employees and patients. ... Healthcare facilities in the path of totality have been working on ways to guarantee the continuation of emergency transportation and acute care services as communities anticipate the arrival of millions of tourists. (Devereaux and DeSilva, 4/5)

AP: Trump Says He'll Announce His Position On Abortion Monday, A Key Moment In The Presidential Race
Former President Donald Trump says he will finally announce Monday when he believes abortions should be banned, after months of refusing to stake a position on an issue that could decide the outcome of November’s presidential election. The presumptive Republican nominee wrote on his social media site Sunday night that he plans to issue a statement on “abortion and abortion rights.” He told reporters last week he would make a statement soon after being asked about Florida’s six-week abortion ban going into effect. (Colvin, 4/8)

The Washington Post: Trump's New Doctor, Bruce Aronwald, Is A 'Fixture' At Trump's Golf Course 
As the former president assails President Biden’s health, he has declined to release details about his own condition beyond a three-paragraph letter by his New Jersey physician: Bruce A. Aronwald, a 64-year-old osteopathic physician from New Jersey — and a longtime member of Trump’s Bedminster golf club. (Kranish, 4/6)

Fox News: CDC On Friday Issued A Health Alert To Inform Doctors About Bird Flu Case
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a health alert Friday to inform clinicians, state health departments and the public of a case of avian influenza — aka bird flu — in a person who had contact with dairy cows in Texas. A farmworker on a commercial dairy farm in Texas developed conjunctivitis last week, and subsequently tested positive for bird flu, the agency said.The positive bird flu diagnosis came after milk from dairy cows in Texas and Kansas tested positive for the disease. (Rumpf-Whitten, 4/5)

CIDRAP: Officials Warn Of H5N1 Avian Flu Reassortant Circulating In Parts Of Asia
Animal health officials in Vietnam and with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) today urged countries to be on alert for a new highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 reassortant virus in chickens and mescovy ducks, which was found during active surveillance. In a statement, the FAO said the virus is a reassortant between the older H5N1 clade (2.3.2.1c) that is still circulating in parts of Asia and a newer H5N1 clade (2.3.4.4b) that began circulating globally in 2021. (Schnirring, 4/5)

CIDRAP: US Flu, COVID, RSV Activity Continues To Recede 
Respiratory virus activity in the United States is still elevated but continues to decline, with only 6 jurisdiction reporting high levels, down from 10 the previous week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today in its data updates. Flu markers declined for the third week in a row, following a prolonged rise after the winter holidays, according to the CDC's latest FluView report. Wastewater SARS-CoV-2 detections remain low and declining in most parts of the country, except for a very small rise in the Northeast. For respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), activity continues to decrease across the country, and 8 of 10 regions are now below the 3% test-positivity threshold, suggesting that the RSV season is ending in those areas. (Schnirring, 4/5)

AP: Study: Many Cancer Drugs Unproven 5 Years After Accelerated Approval
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s accelerated approval program is meant to give patients early access to promising drugs. But how often do these drugs actually improve or extend patients’ lives? In a new study, researchers found that most cancer drugs granted accelerated approval do not demonstrate such benefits within five years. “Five years after the initial accelerated approval, you should have a definitive answer,” said Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a cancer specialist and bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research. “Thousands of people are getting those drugs. That seems a mistake if we don’t know whether they work or not.” (Johnson, 4/7)

Stat: Cells Of Young Are Aging Faster, Study Finds, In Possible Cancer Link
Cancer cases among younger people have been rising for years, a trend researchers have struggled to explain. New evidence suggests a significant factor: younger generations seem to be aging faster at the cellular level than their predecessors. A team of scientists at Washington University in St. Louis tracked data from nearly 150,000 people between the ages of 37 and 54 in the U.K Biobank, a massive biomedical database. They used nine blood-based markers to calculate their biological age, a measure that captures the overall state of a person’s cells and tissues. (Wosen, 4/7)

Reuters: US FDA Allows Expanded Use Of J&J, Bristol Myers Cell Therapies 
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has allowed cell therapies of Johnson & Johnson and Bristol Myers Squibb to be used for treating patients in the earlier stages of a type of blood cancer, the companies said on Friday. Both J&J and Bristol Myers' therapies helped extend the time that patients lived without disease progression in late stage studies — more than when patients received 'standard of care' treatments, the companies said in separate statements. (K and Satija, 4/6)

Fox News: Ice Therapy Shown To Kill Breast Cancer Tumors In New Study: ‘Important Technique’
Ice could be the next frontier in breast cancer therapy, according to new research from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. In breast cancer patients, cold therapy was shown to be effective in freezing and destroying small, cancerous tumors in a study presented at the Society of Interventional Radiology Annual Scientific Meeting in Salt Lake City last week. Cryoablation, a minimally invasive technique, could provide a treatment alternative for patients who are not candidates for surgery, a press release stated. (Rudy, 4/5)

The New York Times: New England Journal Of Medicine Ignored Nazi Atrocities, Historians Find
The journal was “an outlier in its sporadic coverage of the rise of Nazi Germany,” wrote the article’s authors, Allan Brandt and Joelle Abi-Rached, both medical historians at Harvard. Often, the journal simply ignored the Nazis’ medical depredations, such as the horrific experiments conducted on twins at Auschwitz, which were based largely on Adolf Hitler’s spurious “racial science.” In contrast, two other leading science journals — Science and the Journal of the American Medical Association — covered the Nazis’ discriminatory policies throughout Hitler’s tenure, the historians noted. The New England journal did not publish an article “explicitly damning” the Nazis’ medical atrocities until 1949, four years after World War II ended. (Nazaryan, 4/6)

Axios: Conflicts Found On Nuclear Medicine Safety Panel
Federal advisers on nuclear medicine safety had conflicts of interest when they evaluated whether accidental injections of radioactive drugs used in medical imaging should be reported to authorities, according to a watchdog report. Why it matters: The special inquiry found the Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn't have a policy requiring conflict-of-interest reviews and therefore lacks controls to ensure compliance with federal ethics guidelines. (Bettelheim, 4/8)

Houston Chronicle: Transplant 'Irregularities' Trigger Probe At Memorial Hermann
Federal regulators are investigating a "pattern of irregularities" in the liver transplant program at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. In a statement Thursday, the hospital said it voluntarily halted liver transplants after it was notified of irregularities related to its "donor acceptance criteria," or physical factors such as height and weight that help physicians decide whether a donated organ is compatible with a transplant candidate. (Gill, 4/5)

Stat: HCA Charity Care: Higher Amount Reported To CMS Than In Financials
The country’s biggest hospital chain, HCA Healthcare, told the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services it doled out almost $1 billion more in financial assistance to needy patients than it reported on its financial statement in 2022, helping the enormously profitable company extract billions of dollars from taxpayer-funded programs. It’s normal for hospital systems to report more charity care — free and discounted care provided to low-income patients — in their annual filings with CMS than on their financial statements. (Bannow, 4/8)

The New York Times: Insurance Companies Reap Hidden Fees As Patients Get Unexpected Bills 
A little-known data firm helps health insurers make more when less of an out-of-network claim gets paid. Patients can be on the hook for the difference. (Hamby, 4/7)

Modern Healthcare: Teladoc CEO Jason Gorevic Departs The Company
Teladoc CEO Jason Gorevic is out at the company he has led for almost 15 years. The Purchase, New York-based telehealth company on Friday announced Gorevic's immediate departure. Mala Murthy, the company’s chief financial officer, is stepping in as interim CEO while the company’s board searches for a CEO. Murthy has been with Teladoc since June 2019. (Perna, 4/5)

AP: J&J To Pump Another $13B Into Its MedTech Business With Shockwave Deal
Johnson & Johnson is pumping more money into heart care with a roughly $13 billion deal for Shockwave Medical, which specializes in technology that helps open clogged arteries. The health care giant said Friday that it will spend $335 in cash for each share of Shockwave. The total deal value includes cash acquired. The deal has already been approved by the boards of directors from both companies. (Murphy, 4/5)

Stat: Abiomed Heart Pump Reduces Heart Attack Deaths In Trial
A controversial heart pump from Abiomed reduced the number of deaths in severe heart attack patients, according to a highly anticipated randomized trial presented at the American College of Cardiology conference and published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Sunday. The trial, which took 10 years to enroll, followed 355 patients for 180 days in Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom who came into the hospital with a heart attack and dangerously low blood flow, known as cardiogenic shock. (Lawrence, 4/7)

Stat: Trial Challenges Practice Of Using Beta Blockers After Heart Attack
Beta blockers are a mainstay in cardiovascular treatment, frequently given to patients after heart attacks. But a new large trial turns that convention on its head, suggesting that the drugs may not in fact help many of these patients. The trial, which enrolled about 5,000 patients who specifically had preserved ejection fraction after a heart attack, found that long-term treatment with beta blockers did not significantly reduce the combined risk of death or new heart attack, according to results being presented here Sunday at the American College of Cardiology conference and published in the New England Journal of Medicine. (Chen, 4/7)

Bloomberg: Novo’s Wegovy Aids Heart Failure Patients With Diabetes In Study
Wegovy, the blockbuster weight-loss medication from Novo Nordisk A/S, eased heart failure symptoms for patients with diabetes in the latest large trial to support use of the drug to treat health conditions linked to obesity. Patients who took Wegovy reported less fatigue, less leg swelling, were less short of breath and were able to walk farther in six minutes than those who got a placebo, researchers reported on Saturday in the New England Journal of Medicine. (Kresge, 4/6)

The Washington Post: Women Using Ozempic And Similar Drugs Are Reporting Unexpected Pregnancies 
Across social media, women who have used Ozempic or similar medications for diabetes or weight loss are reporting an unexpected side effect — surprise pregnancies. The Facebook group “I got pregnant on Ozempic,” has more than 500 members. Numerous posts on Reddit and TikTok discuss unplanned pregnancies while on Ozempic and similar drugs which can spur significant weight loss by curbing appetite and slowing the digestive process. The drugs are known as “Glucagon-like peptide 1” or GLP-1 drugs. (Klein, 4/5)

The Washington Post: FDA Urged To Rescind Approval Of AvertD Test For Opioid Addiction Risk 
A group of public health experts and scientists is calling on the Food and Drug Administration to rescind its controversial approval of a DNA test that promises to predict genetic risk of opioid addiction. In a letter sent to the agency on Thursday, 31 experts in genetics, addiction, psychiatry and medical-device regulation called the approval of AvertD a mistake that relied on faulty science and puts patients at risk. The group sent a separate letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services urging the agency, which oversees government health insurance programs, to deny coverage for the prescription-only test. (Ovalle, 4/5)

The New York Times: Teen Drug Use Habits Are Changing, For The Good. With Caveats. 
Dr. Nora Volkow, who leads the National Institutes of Drug Abuse, would like the public to know things are getting better. Mostly. (Richtel, 4/6)

NBC News: Gambling Addiction Hotlines Say Calls Are Up As Online Sports Betting Booms
In state after state, centers for problem gambling are noticing an alarming rise in calls to their helplines. The circumstances reported are also getting more severe, according to the directors of five problem gambling centers, a gambling researcher and an addiction counselor. People are filing for bankruptcy or losing homes or relationships. At the same time, callers are skewing younger, the experts said — often men in their 20s and 30s. (Mogg and Bendix, 4/5)

The New York Times: Maryland Passes 2 Major Privacy Bills, Despite Tech Industry Pushback
The Maryland Legislature this weekend passed two sweeping privacy bills that aim to restrict how powerful tech platforms can harvest and use the personal data of consumers and young people — despite strong objections from industry trade groups representing giants like Amazon, Google and Meta. One bill, the Maryland Online Data Privacy Act, would impose wide-ranging restrictions on how companies may collect and use the personal data of consumers in the state. The other, the Maryland Kids Code, would prohibit certain social media, video game and other online platforms from tracking people under 18 and from using manipulative techniques — like auto-playing videos or bombarding children with notifications — to keep young people glued online. (Singer, 4/7)

The Boston Globe: N.H. Senate Approves Bills Flagged As ‘Harmful’ By State Child Advocate’s Office
The New Hampshire Senate approved two controversial bills on Friday that have drawn the concern of LGBTQ+ advocates. The bills would bar transgender girls from women’s sports teams starting in 6th grade and including college (Senate Bill 375), and require teachers respond “completely and honestly” to parents’ questions about their child (Senate Bill 341). Advocates are concerned this could cause the forcible “outing” of LGBTQ+ students to their parents, while proponents say parents have a right to know and the bills will restore trust in schools. (Gokee, 4/5)

The Boston Globe: New Manager Hopes To Save Historic Boston Nursing Home
Staff at the Edgar P. Benjamin Healthcare Center, a historic Boston nursing home in Mission Hill, were ebullient Friday, clapping and cheering as their new, court-appointed manager promised to do everything he could to keep the facility open. “I’m not coming here in order to look to dissolve this organization,” said Joseph Feaster, a Boston attorney appointed as receiver of the facility, which serves a population of mostly Black and Latino residents. “I’m looking to come here to see whether this organization can be sustained.” (Laughlin, 4/5)

AP: Victims Of Montana Asbestos Pollution Take Warren Buffet’s Railroad To Court
Hundreds of people died and more than 3,000 have been sickened from asbestos exposure in the Libby, Montana area, according to researchers and health officials. (Brown and Hanson, 4/7)

Los Angeles Times: Can Calmara AI App Really Detect Infections In Sex Partners?
Late last month, the San Francisco-based startup HeHealth announced the launch of Calmara.ai, a cheerful, emoji-laden website the company describes as “your tech savvy BFF for STI checks.” ... Calmara describes the free service as “the next best thing to a lab test for a quick check,” powered by artificial intelligence. ... Since its debut, privacy and public health experts have pointed with alarm to a number of significant oversights in Calmara’s design. (Purtill, 4/7)

Charlotte Ledger: Inside Charlotte's Private Cadaver Lab
In a nondescript office building near the Charlotte airport last month, adults clad in blue gowns crowded around the body of a woman who had died of cardiovascular disease. An instructor gently pressed her gloved finger against the woman’s lung and invited the others to do the same. “If you’ve never felt a lung, you need to feel a lung,” she said. “Most people think lungs are like a balloon, but they are more like a kitchen sponge. They have millions of tiny air sacs.” (Crouch, 4/8)