Sunday, Jul 13th
Last update07:26:19 AM GMT
Health Glance
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued the country's three largest pharmacy benefit managers on Friday, accusing them of steering diabetes patients toward higher-priced insulin to reap millions of dollars in rebates from pharmaceutical companies.
The case accuses UnitedHealth Group Inc's Optum unit, CVS Health Corp's CVS Caremark and Cigna Corp's Express Scripts of unfairly excluding lower-cost insulin products from lists of drugs covered by insurers.
Taking a daily multivitamin does not help people to live any longer and may actually increase the risk of an early death, a major study has found.
Researchers in the US analysed health records from nearly 400,000 adults with no major long-term diseases to see whether daily multivitamins reduced their risk of death over the next two decades.
Rather than living longer, people who consumed daily multivitamins were marginally more likely than non-users to die in the study period, prompting the government researchers to comment that “multivitamin use to improve longevity is not supported”.
Nearly half of UK adults take multivitamins or dietary supplements once a week or more, part of a domestic market worth more than half a billion pounds annually. The global market for the supplements is estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars each year. In the US, a third of adults use multivitamins in the hope of preventing disease.
Blanock had come across a live stream of a community meeting to discuss rare cancers that were occurring with alarming frequency in south-western Pennsylvania, where she lives.
Between 2009 and 2019, five other students in Blanock’s school district were also diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma. (The region saw about 30 overall cases of the cancer during that time.) In the video, health experts and residents were talking about whether the uptick in illnesses was related to fracking. Blanock was riveted.
Antibiotics cannot cure COVID. They don’t help a bit. And yet, new data shows that, during the pandemic, COVID patients were given antibiotics – a lot of antibiotics.
That’s bad because the overuse of antibiotics can breed superbugs that are resistant to medications. The impact of this pandemic overuse has lingered even as the pandemic has faded.
So how did this unfortunate turn of events come to be? A series of new reports and papers shed light.
Globally, about 75% of patients hospitalized with COVID were given antibiotics, despite only 8% having a bacterial coinfection where antibiotics would be medically useful. This comes from new data published in late April that was collected through the World Health Organization’s Global Clinical Platform in 65 countries between January 2020 and March 2023.
When dermatologist Adewole "Ade" Adamson sees people spritzing sunscreen as if it's cologne at the pool where he lives in Austin, Texas, he wants to intervene. "My wife says I shouldn't," he said, "even though most people rarely use enough sunscreen."
At issue is not just whether people are using enough sunscreen, but what ingredients are in it.
In countries such as Japan, South Korea, and France, sunscreens include newer chemical filters, some of which have been shown to provide broader protection against UV rays than those used in the U.S.
The Food and Drug Administration's ability to approve such ingredients is hamstrung by a 1938 U.S. law that has required sunscreens to be tested on animals and classified as drugs, rather than as cosmetics as they are in much of the world.
Vice President Kamala Harris made a historic visit to an abortion clinic in the Twin Cities Thursday, demanding "we have to be a nation that trusts women" and declaring that access to reproductive medical care has spiraled into a "health crisis."
The visit to the Planned Parenthood facility − the first ever by a president or vice president to a clinic that provides abortion services − marked the most dramatic push by President Joe Biden's reelection campaign to make access to abortion a defining issue in the 2024 election.
Harris, the nation's first female vice president, has become the White House's leading voice on restoring abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending a 50-year constitutional right to an abortion and prompting several Republican-led states to pass laws limiting abortion access.
Iain Campbell was gazing out the bus window on his way to work when he first sensed something radical was reshaping how he experienced the world.
The inkling emerged from an altogether ordinary observation: He felt peaceful, maybe even happy as he watched the trees along the road pass by.
"I hadn't experienced that in a really long time, probably since I was a kid," says Campbell, who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
"I didn't know what was going on at the time, but I thought this might be what it feels like to be normal."
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