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Lack of Affordability Tops Older Americans’ List of Health Care Worries
What weighs most heavily on older adults’ minds when it comes to health care?. The cost of services and therapies, and their ability to pay. Tens of millions of seniors are similarly anxious about being able to afford health care because of its expense and rising costs for housing, food, and other essentials.
1st Biden-Trump Debate of 2024: What They Got Wrong, and Right
President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Democratic and Republican presidential nominees, shared a debate stage June 27 for the first time since 2020, in a confrontation that — because of strict debate rules — managed to avoid the near-constant interruptions that marred their previous encounters.
New NASEM Reports Offer Broad Definition, Highlight the Seriousness of Long COVID
The field of long COVID research reached a major milestone last [month] with the release of a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) outlining a working definition of the disease. This definition report, drawing from hundreds of scientific papers and the lived experience of...
CDC Recommends Updated 2024-2025 COVID-19 and Flu Vaccines for Fall/Winter Virus Season
[On June 27], the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended the updated 2024-2025 COVID-19 vaccines and the updated 2024-2025 flu vaccines to protect against severe COVID-19 and flu this fall and winter. It is safe to receive COVID-19 and flu vaccines at the same visit. Data continue to...
NIH-Sponsored Trial of Nasal COVID-19 Vaccine Opens
A Phase 1 trial testing the safety of an experimental nasal vaccine that may provide enhanced breadth of protection against emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is now enrolling healthy adults at three sites in the United States. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is sponsoring the...
Nearly 1.8 Billion Adults at Risk of Disease From Not Enough Physical Activity
New data show that nearly one third (31%) of adults worldwide, approximately 1.8 billion people, did not meet the recommended levels of physical activity in 2022. The findings point to a worrying trend of physical inactivity among adults, which has increased by about 5 percentage points between 2010 and 2022.
Court Mostly Upholds Coverage of PrEP and Preventive Health Care, for Now
Following a federal appeals court decision it deemed “something of a mixed bag,” most health insurers must continue to cover certain preventive services and their related costs, including pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to prevent HIV along with screenings for cancer. However, the court ruled against the system that decides which procedures must be covered, declaring that the agency behind the health coverage requirement operates unconstitutionally.
New Effort to Include People With HIV or on PrEP in Clinical Trials [VIDEO]
When clinical trial researchers write their guidelines and decide on eligible participants, most continue to copy and paste outdated boilerplate language from the early days of the AIDS epidemic. As a result, clinical trials exclude people living with HIV as well as those who are HIV negative but take antiretrovirals as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to prevent HIV. Similarly, LGBTQ people—also referred to as SGMs for “sexual and gender minorities”—are underrepresented in clinical studies.
Learning How to Live and Die With Long COVID
This story was originally published by High Country News. The heady scent of wet creosote hung in the air the morning we skirted impossible alluvial fans on our way to the lowest point in North America. Since the Pleistocene, Badwater Basin, 236 feet below sea level, has primarily been a salt flat, but deluges from Hurricane Hilary and a recent atmospheric river had filled the pan with billions of gallons of water. Lake Manly was a zombie, back from the dead. Many said it was the largest it had been for decades. Pushed by strong winds in March, it even drifted two miles north, like some kind of restless soul.
Biden Leans Into Health Care, Asking Voters To Trust Him Over Trump
Angling to tap into strong support for the sweeping health law he helped pass 14 years ago, one of President Joe Biden’s latest reelection strategies is to remind voters that former President Donald Trump tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act. “Folks, he’s coming for your health care, and...
Infectious H5N1 Influenza Virus in Raw Milk Rapidly Declines With Heat Treatment
The amount of infectious H5N1 influenza viruses in raw milk rapidly declined with heat treatment in laboratory research conducted by scientists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health. However, small, detectable amounts of infectious virus remained in raw milk samples...
New Definition for Long COVID Could Aid in Consistent Diagnosis, Documentation and Treatment
A new National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report says the federal government, state and local authorities, clinicians, medical societies and organizations, public health practitioners, employers, educators, and others should adopt a new definition for “Long COVID” — that it is an infection-associated chronic condition that occurs after COVID-19 infection and is present for at least three months as a continuous, relapsing and remitting, or progressive disease state that affects one or more organ systems.
Updated COVID-19 Vaccines for Use in the United States Beginning in Fall 2024
FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) met on June 5, 2024, to discuss and make recommendations on the selection of the 2024-2025 Formula for COVID-19 vaccines for use in the United States beginning in the fall of 2024. The committee unanimously voted to recommend a monovalent...
Experts Warn of Serious Health Impacts From Climate Change
Pregnant women, newborns, children, adolescents and older people are facing serious health complications due to climate change, according to a new collection of papers published in the Journal of Global Health, and yet the specific needs of these groups have been largely neglected in the climate response. The articles document...
Bird Flu Tests Are Hard To Get. So How Will We Know When To Sound the Pandemic Alarm?
Stanford University infectious disease doctor Abraar Karan has seen a lot of patients with runny noses, fevers, and irritated eyes lately. Such symptoms could signal allergies, COVID, or a cold. This year, there’s another suspect, bird flu — but there’s no way for most doctors to know.
Biden Administration Advances Plan To Remove Medical Debt From Credit Scores
Americans would no longer have to worry about medical debts dragging down their credit scores under federal regulations proposed Tuesday by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If enacted, the rules would dramatically expand protections for tens of millions of Americans burdened by medical bills they can’t afford. The regulations...
Safety-Net Health Clinics Cut Services and Staff Amid Medicaid ‘Unwinding’
One of Montana’s largest health clinics that serves people in poverty has cut back services and laid off workers. The retrenchment mirrors similar cuts around the country as safety-net health centers feel the effects of states purging their Medicaid rolls. Billings-based RiverStone Health is eliminating 42 jobs this spring,...
“They Bungled It”: NIH Documents Reveal How $1.6 Billion Long Covid Initiative Has Failed so Far to Meet its Goals
The NIH made key structural errors in setting up RECOVER, namely concentrating funding with a small number of researchers and, in selecting those researchers, failing to prioritize people who had experience in studying or treating post-infectious chronic diseases before the pandemic. Structural issues with RECOVER fit into broader patterns with...
CDC Confirms Second Human H5 Bird Flu Case in Michigan
A second human case of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A(H5) virus infection has been identified in the state of Michigan. This is the third human case associated with an ongoing multistate outbreak of A(H5N1) in U.S. dairy cows. None of the three cases are associated with the others. As...
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