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New guidance on prescribing opioids unveiled Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention avoids the strict limits found in a 2016 version that accelerated a nationwide drop in pain pill prescriptions but led to backlash from chronic pain patients.

The 229-page document advises doctors to limit new opioid prescriptions and discuss alternative therapies with patients. But the new guidance largely avoids figures on dosage and length of prescription and warns against abruptly or rapidly discontinuing pain pills for some chronic pain patients.

"We've built in flexibility so that there's not a one-size-fits-all approach," said Christopher Jones, acting director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

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A new injectable treatment for HIV pre-exposure prevention, or PrEP, has been approved by the Federal Drug Administration.

The drug, Apretude, is approved for at-risk adults and adolescents who weigh at least 77 pounds to reduce the risk of sexually acquired HIV, the FDA announced Monday.

“Today’s approval adds an important tool in the effort to end the HIV epidemic by providing the first option to prevent HIV that does not involve taking a daily pill,” Debra Birnkrant, director of the Division of Antivirals in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in the announcement.

After the initial two injections, Apretude is administered one month apart, then every two months after that. The hope is that high-risk individuals, like men who have sex with men, will have better adherence to taking the PrEP injectable option every two months versus taking a pill everyday.

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday it had received reports of eight cases of myocarditis, a type of heart inflammation, in children aged 5-11 years who received Pfizer (PFE.N) and BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine.

The CDC had previously said that reporting rates of myocarditis for boys aged 16 to 17 could be more than 69 cases per million second doses administered and around 40 cases per million second doses in boys aged 12-15 years old.

The CDC did not say whether it believes there is a link between the myocarditis cases and the vaccine, or disclose the rate of myocarditis in the age group without vaccination.

The agency said there had been over 7 million vaccine doses in the 5-11 age group at the time it examined the data, with 5.1 million first doses and 2 million second doses. The cases had a mild clinical course, the CDC said.

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- A U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory panel will meet on Thursday to consider possible limits on the use of the Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) COVID-19 vaccine because of continued blood clot issues, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

The CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices will be presented new data that appears to show the rate of clots in people who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has increased since April, the Post reported, citing clinicians familiar with the agenda.

Use of the vaccine in the United States was paused for 10 days in April to investigate extremely rare but potentially deadly clots, mostly in young and middle-aged women. r

There have been about nine deaths related to the issue, the Post said, citing an unnamed federal official.

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Decisions by top officials responding to President Donald Trump’s edict to protect “America first” contributed to a global delay in Covid-19 vaccine donations and a lack of effort to assist low- and middle-income countries, according to five current and former U.S. officials who worked under Trump on the federal pandemic response.

The failure to view the Covid threat in global terms left some nations — including those where the Omicron variant emerged in recent weeks — lacking inoculation and much more vulnerable to mutations, the officials said.

They described a White House and its health agencies fixated on one goal: obtaining enough drugs and protective gear to shield the American people from Covid-19. But that strategy, pushed directly by Trump and his senior aides, neglected to seriously consider the threat of variants and spread of infections if lower-income countries were left unprotected, the officials said.

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