First Edition: July 19, 2023

KFF Health News: Once The New Over-The-Counter Birth Control Pill Is Available, What About Cost And Coverage?
Last week, the FDA approved Opill, the first daily oral contraceptive that will be available for sale over the counter in stores as well as online. Reproductive health advocates hailed the groundbreaking approval as a step that can help millions of people avoid pregnancy, which is unintended nearly half the time in the United States. They long have argued that eliminating the often-time-consuming step of requiring people to get a prescription before they can get birth control pills would expand access and give people more control over their contraceptive decisions. (Andrews, 7/19)

KFF Health News: Listen To The Latest ‘KFF Health News Minute’
“KFF Health News Minute” brings original health care and health policy reporting from the KFF Health News newsroom to the airwaves each week. (7/18)

AP: Phoenix Sweltered From Heat That Will Break Record For US Cities
A dangerous 19th straight day of scorching heat in Phoenix set a record for U.S. cities Tuesday, confined many residents to air-conditioned safety and turned the usually vibrant metropolis into a ghost town. The city’s record streak of 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius) or more stood out even amid sweltering temperatures across the globe. It reached 117 degrees (47.2 Celsius) by 3 p.m. (Borenstein and Snow, 7/18)

The New York Times: Extreme Heat Grips 3 Continents As Climate Change Warms Earth
John Kerry, the U.S. special envoy for climate change, sought to coordinate some of the global response with the Chinese premier in Beijing, as a heat wave clutched a huge swath of China. “The world really is looking to us for that leadership, particularly on the climate issue,” Mr. Kerry told Chinese officials. “Climate, as you know, is a global issue, not a bilateral issue. It’s a threat to all of humankind.” (Yuhas, 7/18)

The Boston Globe: Poor Air Quality Alert Issued For Massachusetts Through Wednesday Due To Canadian Smoke
An air quality alert for Massachusetts will be in effect from midnight Tuesday until 11:59 p.m. Wednesday due to smoke from the Canadian wildfires, state environmental officials said. Poor air quality is dangerous for people in sensitive groups, including those with lung or heart disease, older adults, children, teenagers, and people who are active outdoors, the state Department of Environmental Protection said Tuesday. (Guffey, 7/18)

Los Angeles Times: Worse Air Quality In L.A. Expected During Heat Wave
The heat wave baking Southern California not only raises the risk of wildfires and heat-related illness but could bring another hardship: bad air quality. The South Coast Air Quality Management District issued an air quality alert for inland areas of the South Coast Air Basin and the Coachella Valley because of elevated levels of ozone likely to cause poor air quality during the afternoon and early evening. The alert took effect Friday at 2 p.m. and continues until Tuesday at 8 p.m. (Lin, 7/18)

The New York Times: Canada Wildfire Smoke Worsens Air Quality In Georgia And North Carolina
Smoke from wildfires in Canada that pushed deep into the United States this week has reached new areas in the South, including in North Carolina and Georgia, that had mostly escaped the toxic drift blowing in from the fires in June, officials said. “Horrific up here!” Merry Miller Weis, a 70-year-old resident in the Western North Carolina mountains, wrote in an email to state climate scientists. “The mountains aren’t even visible. This is the absolute worst since the beginning of the Canadian fires.” (Hauser, 7/18)

Stateline: Workers Lack Protections When Wildfire Smoke Makes The Air Dangerous 
Millions of American workers have breathed in dangerous levels of air pollution this year as smoke from Canada’s record wildfire season blankets cities across the Northeast. Now experts are calling on federal regulators to adopt standards protecting outdoor workers from worsening air quality, potentially modeled after the few states that have such standards, including California and Oregon. (Dewey, 7/18)

Politico: Experts Say The Biden Administration Could Blow Its Biggest Chance To Get Smokers To Quit
Even as the agency prepares to roll out a menthol cigarette ban later this summer, the FDA’s bar for authorizing less-harmful menthol e-cigarettes to help smokers quit is so high that it may be impossible to reach. That’s the upshot of communications from the FDA to Logic, a major e-cigarette maker, and comments from former FDA officials and public health experts, who worry the impact of a menthol cigarette ban may fall far short of its desired effect. The communications are in documents obtained by POLITICO through a Freedom of Information request. (Ellen Foley, 7/18)

San Francisco Chronicle: California’s Early Childhood Services Hit By Drop In Tobacco Tax Haul
For 25 years, some of California’s best-known early childhood services have been funded by an almost ironic source: Taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products. That was the deal voters made when they passed Proposition 10 in 1998, levying a tobacco tax and dedicating the money for programs that would help families with young children. The arrangement was never supposed to last forever. Advocates for youth services have known from the beginning that fewer people would smoke over time, and the funding would fall. (Ibarra, 7/18)

The Hill: Vaping Harms Heart And Lungs: American Heart Association
The use of e-cigarettes was found to have a negative impact on the heart and lungs as the American Heart Association (AHA) calls for further research into the issue. “E-cigarettes deliver numerous substances into the body that are potentially harmful, including chemicals and other compounds that are likely not known to or understood by the user,” volunteer chair of the AHA scientific statement writing committee Jason Rose said in a new scientific statement released Monday. (Sforza, 7/18)

Reuters: Teladoc Expands Microsoft Tie-Up To Document Patient Visits With AI 
Teladoc Health is expanding a partnership with Microsoft to use the tech giant's artificial intelligence services to automate clinical documentation on the telehealth platform, lifting its shares 6% in premarket trade. The integration of AI including Microsoft's services with technology from OpenAI, owner of viral chatbot ChatGPT, will help ease the burden on healthcare staff during virtual exams, Teladoc said on Tuesday. (7/18)

Modern Healthcare: Teladoc Health, Microsoft Team Up On Generative AI
Teladoc Health is adding Nuance's voice-enabled generative artificial intelligence solution to help its providers with documentation, the companies said on Tuesday. Under the agreement, Teladoc clinicians will use Nuance’s Dragon Ambient eXperience Express generative AI tools to automatically produce clinical visit notes. Nuance, owned by tech giant Microsoft, said the tool can summarize and enter conversations between clinicians and patients directly into electronic health record systems using OpenAI's GPT-4 generative AI capabilities. (Turner, 7/18)

Modern Healthcare: How A Texas Health System Is Deploying AI For Gun Detection
UMC Health System is the latest healthcare organization to incorporate artificial intelligence into its operations. It’s one of the few to use it to detect guns. The health system in Lubbock, Texas, is adding an AI-based video analytics platform onto its existing security system that will detect, without using facial recognition software, whether someone is carrying a gun, said Jeff Hill, the system's vice president of operations. If the system from ZeroEyes detects a weapon, it will alert someone at ZeroEyes, who will determine whether a real threat exists. If so, UMC security staff at the hospital will be notified, he said. (Perna, 7/18)

AP: Missouri Supreme Court Weighs Fate Of Amendment To Restore Abortion Rights
Whether Missouri voters get a chance weigh in on legalizing abortion is now up to state Supreme Court judges, who on Tuesday heard arguments in a case about Republican infighting that has stalled the amendment’s progress. Judges did not indicate when they might rule on the case, which centers around a proposed amendment to enshrine in the constitution the individual right to make decisions about abortion, childbirth and birth control. Abortion-rights supporters proposed it after the state banned almost all abortions last summer. (Ballentine, 7/18)

The Hill: Patients Seeking Abortion, Gender-Affirming Care At Risk Of Increased Surveillance: Report
Patients seeking out-of-state abortions and gender-affirming care are at risk of increased surveillance from law enforcement, according to a new report. The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) released a report Tuesday detailing the elevated dangers for patients who travel for abortions or gender-affirming care. (Nazarro, 7/18)

AP: Louisiana Lawmakers Overturn Governor's Veto On Gender-Affirming Care Ban For Transgender Minors 
Louisiana’s Republican-dominated Legislature overturned Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards’ recent veto of a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors on Tuesday. Louisiana, where the ban is scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2024, will join 20 other states that have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care, which includes puberty-blockers, hormone treatment and gender-reassignment surgery. Most of those states face now lawsuits, and in some places the bans have been temporarily blocked by federal judges. (Cline, 7/18)

AP: Kansas' Governor Gets To Defend Birth Certificate Changes In Court, A Judge Rules
A federal judge is considering Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s arguments that a new Kansas law rolling back transgender rights doesn’t bar the state from changing the sex listing on transgender people’s birth certificates. U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree ruled Tuesday that Kelly’s office can defend her administration’s policy of changing birth certificates and accepted its “friend of the court” arguments. The state’s Republican attorney general, Kris Kobach, argues that a law that took effect July 1 prohibits such changes and requires the state to undo previous ones. (Hanna, 7/18)

Reuters: J&J Sues In Latest Bid To Halt Medicare Drug Price Negotiations
Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) sued the U.S. government on Tuesday, becoming the latest drugmaker seeking to block a program that gives the Medicare government health insurance plan the power to negotiate lower drug prices. The pharmaceutical industry says the drug price negotiation program under President Joe Biden's signature Inflation Reduction Act law will curtail profits and compel drugmakers to curb development of groundbreaking new treatments. (7/18)

Bloomberg: White House Asks CVS, Walmart For Help Promoting Inflation Reduction Act
Biden administration officials asked executives from major drug and retail chains to counter stiff opposition from the pharmaceutical industry and help promote a law intended to lower drug costs. (Griffin, 7/18)

Los Angeles Times: Feinstein Says Late Husband's Trust Not Paying Her Medical Bills
After acute health problems that kept her away from Washington for months earlier this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein is now engaged in a legal effort to gain more control of the finances from her late husband’s trust. The 90-year-old senator filed a petition asking a court to make her daughter, Katherine Feinstein, a successor trustee of Richard Blum’s trust, arguing that the people serving as trustees “have refused to make distributions to reimburse Senator Feinstein’s medical expenses.” (Oreskes, 7/18)

Bloomberg: US Suspends Wuhan Institute Of Virology’s Access To Federal Funding 
The Biden administration formally halted the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s access to US funding, citing unanswered safety and security questions for the facility at the center of the Covid lab leak theory. The Department of Health and Human Services notified the institute about the suspension on Monday and told the lab it’s seeking to cut it off permanently, according to a memo obtained by Bloomberg News. An HHS review that started in September raised concern that the facility based in Wuhan, where Covid first emerged, is violating biosafety protocols and isn’t complying with US regulations. (Griffin, 7/18)

The New York Times: Biden Administration Moves To Ban Funding For Wuhan Lab
The Biden administration is taking steps to impose a 10-year ban on funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese research laboratory at the center of a heated debate over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a memo made public by a House subcommittee on Tuesday evening and an official familiar with the issue. (Gay Stolberg, 7/18)

Politico: NDAA Likely To Include Senate Banking Amendments On Fentanyl, AI
Senators will likely attach a measure to crack down on opioid trafficking and a provision that would require banking regulators to report on their use of artificial intelligence to the National Defense Authorization Act, according to a near-final manager’s agreement viewed Tuesday. (Mueller, 7/18)

AP: Border Patrol Fails To Assess Medical Needs For Children With Preexisting Conditions, Report Says
Border Patrol does not have protocols for assessing medical needs of children with preexisting conditions, according to an independent report made public Tuesday on the death of an 8-year-old girl from Panama who was in federal custody. The girl’s death was “a preventable tragedy that resulted from” failures in “medical and custodial systems for children” within U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency that includes the Border Patrol, the report found. (Cruz and Gonzalez, 7/19)

CIDRAP: Florida Reports More Cases Of Malaria And Dengue
In its latest weekly arbovirus report, the Florida Department of Health confirmed one more local malaria case as well as one more local dengue infection. The report covers mosquito-borne illness activity for the week ending July 15. The malaria case involves a resident of Sarasota County, where the earlier locally acquired cases occurred. The new case lifts the number of local cases for the year to seven. Texas also reported a local malaria case this year, which involved someone from Cameron County. (Schnirring, 7/18)

AP: Florida County Reports Its 7th Case Of Locally Contracted Malaria 
A southwest Florida county has document a seventh case of malaria, state authorities said. The Florida Department of Health reported a new locally acquired case of malaria in Sarasota County during the week of July 9-15. That’s in addition to five cases last month and one case in May. (7/19)

San Francisco Chronicle: Dangerous New Strain Of Fentanyl Discovered In S.F.’s Drug Supply
A dangerous new strain of fentanyl — fluorofentanyl — was found in dozens of overdose deaths in San Francisco last year while a concerning new street drug called xylazine — commonly known as “tranq” — was present in more than a dozen cases, according to a new report from the medical examiner. Fluorofentanyl, which can range from half to five times as powerful as prescribed fentanyl, was found in 45 deaths, while xylazine, a veterinary tranquilizer not intended for human consumption, was identified in 15 cases. Different kinds of fentanyl were found in 12 cases. All tranq cases also contained fentanyl. (Moench, 7/18)

USA Today: Misdiagnosis Kills, Disables An Alarming Number Of Americans Each Year
For years, the public hasn't known much about the full scope of medical misdiagnoses that happen in the U.S., according to a new report released by the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute Center for Diagnostic Excellence. Until now, estimates of annual incorrect diagnoses have varied widely, the report says. Now, researchers say an estimated 371,000 patients die and 424,000 are permanently disabled each year because they are incorrectly diagnosed across a range of medical care settings — not just in the family doctor's office. (Thornton, 7/18)

CIDRAP: Study Shows Dogs Can Detect COVID-19 Faster, Better Than Most PCR Tests 
A new review of literature on COVID-19–sniffing canines shows dogs outperformed or matched reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests or antigen tests in detecting the novel coronavirus among humans or patient samples containing sweat, saliva, or urine. (Soucheray, 7/18)

CIDRAP: Experts Offer Tips To Combat Rampant Online COVID, Other Health Misinformation
The US medical and public health communities should work together to combat online health misinformation through sustainable investments in media monitoring and counter messaging, according to a Harvard Medical School–led research team. Their report, published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine, describes how to address untruths such as the social media rumors that undermined trust in science during the COVID-19 pandemic. (7/18)

CIDRAP: 'Hybrid' Prenatal Care Not Tied To Worse Maternal, Newborn Health Amid COVID-19
Kaiser Permanente Northern California (KPNC) researchers report that a combination of in-person and telehealth prenatal visits during the COVID-19 pandemic wasn't linked to a higher risk of worse maternal and newborn outcomes, although the rate of neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) admissions rose slightly from March to December 2020. (Van Beusekom, 7/18)

CIDRAP: ECDC Reports Spread Of Multidrug-Resistant Shigella
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said today that more than 300 cases of shigellosis have been reported since April in Europe and the United States, most of them multidrug-resistant (MDR), with transmission seen primarily among men who have sex with men (MSM). (Dall, 7/18)

NBC News: How Weekend Workouts May Be As Effective As Exercising All Week
Adults should get 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity per week, most guidelines recommend, with the typical advice to spread it out through the week. Harvard researchers were surprised to find that people who jammed their 2.5 hours of activity into one or two days cut their risk of heart attack by 27%, compared to 35% among people who exercised more days of the week. "Weekend warriors" also saw heart failure risk drop by 38%, compared to 36% among regular exercisers, the new study published Tuesday in JAMA found. (Caroll, 7/18)

NPR: Cellular Atlas And Endometriosis Breakthroughs
Dr. Kate Lawrenson's research is granular. As a professor of obstetrics and gynecology and co-director of the Women's Cancer Research program at Cedars-Sinai, she spends her days analyzing individual cells. It may sound tedious, but it's this kind of fine grain work that's led to many breakthroughs in cancer research. Lawrenson hopes that this approach will lead to breakthroughs in a different disease — endometriosis. ... (Cirino, Kwong, Rubin and Ramirez, 7/18)

Reuters: J&J Must Pay $18.8 Million To California Cancer Patient In Baby Powder Suit
Johnson & Johnson's (JNJ.N) must pay $18.8 million to a California man who said he developed cancer from exposure to its baby powder, a jury decided on Tuesday, a setback for the company as it seeks to settle thousands of similar cases over its talc-based products in U.S. bankruptcy court. (Pierson, 7/19)

CIDRAP: Agreement Will Expand Access To Key Drug For Resistant TB
An agreement between the Stop TB Partnership and pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson (J&J) will expand access to a key component of the shorter drug regimen for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). Under the agreement, which was announced last week, J&J granted Stop TB Partnership's Global Drug Facility (GDF) licenses that will enable it to "tender, procure, and supply" generic versions of Sirturo (bedaquiline) for most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including those in which the drug is still under patent. Bedaquiline is part of the 6-month regimens that are recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) for treating MDR-TB. (Dall, 7/18)

Reuters: Pfizer, Flagship Pioneering To Invest $100 Mln In Drug Discovery
U.S. drugmaker Pfizer (PFE.N) and venture firm Flagship Pioneering on Tuesday said they would invest $100 million together to develop up to 10 new potential drugs for areas including internal medicine, oncology, infectious diseases and immunology. Flagship, which has incubated biotech companies, most famously Moderna Inc (MRNA.O), and Pfizer will each invest $50 million. Flagship's drug discovery initiative Pioneering Medicines will lead the exploration process. (7/18)

Reuters: US Judge Rejects $45 Mln Award To CareDx In Natera False Ads Case
A Delaware federal judge on Monday threw out a $45 million damages award for genetic testing company CareDx (CDNA.O) in a false-advertising case against rival Natera (NTRA.O). U.S. District Judge Colm Connolly said the jury award was unjustified because there was no evidence that Natera's allegedly misleading advertisements about its Prospera tests for kidney-transplant patients deceived customers. (Brittain, 7/18)

Reuters: Softbank-Backed Neumora's Depression Drug Cuts Symptoms In Mid-Stage Trial
Softbank-backed Neumora Therapeutics' experimental drug navacaprant has helped reduce symptoms of depression in patients with moderate-to-severe forms of the disorder in a mid-stage trial, the company said on Tuesday. Neumora, whose investors include SoftBank Vision Fund and Amgen (AMGN.O), said it would begin late-stage studies of the drug in some patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). (7/18)

Los Angeles Times: California Will Cap Hundreds Of Orphaned Oil Wells 
California state regulators announced on Tuesday their plans to cap orphaned oil wells across the state, including wells in a South Central residential neighborhood near USC that caused health complaints from residents for years. The effort is part of a new push to close problem sites that have posed health risks to communities across the state, oftentimes disadvantaged neighborhoods in close proximity to oil drill sites. California Gov. Gavin Newsom earmarked $100 million in the state budget to address the issue. (Solis and Martinez, 7/18)

AP: Western North Carolina Tribe To Vote On Broader Legalization Of Adult Use Of Marijuana 
Members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians will vote in September on whether they want to legalize marijuana possession and sales on tribal lands for anyone 21 and older — not just for those seeking it for medical use that the North Carolina tribe had already authorized. The Tribal Council agreed last week to place the question on the ballot during the tribe’s Sept. 7 general election. (7/18)