TV News LIES

California last week clocked its fourth case of locally transmitted dengue fever this year — an alarming rise in a sometimes-deadly disease that experts fear could be fueled by climate change.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health confirmed the newest incidence of the mosquito-borne illness in a resident of Panorama City, a neighborhood in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. The department noted that the individual had not traveled to areas where dengue is endemic, and that the case appeared unrelated to three others, also locally acquired, that were reported in the county earlier this month.

“We are seeing the local transmission of dengue, which is unprecedented in Los Angeles County,” Muntu Davis, Los Angeles County health officer, said in a statement.

Advocate Health, the third largest non-profit health system in the country, has announced it will cancel more than 11,500 debt judgments it holds against people who failed to pay medical bills.

The move comes after more than a year of public scrutiny of the hospital conglomerate’s aggressive debt collection practices – including news articles by the Guardian and other media outlets and a study by the Duke University School of Law and the state treasurer of North Carolina, where the chain is headquartered.

The study, released in August 2023, found that the hospital group filed more debt lawsuits against patients – 2,482 – than any other hospital system in the state between 2017 and 2022.

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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.

or the first time in decades, public health data shows a sudden and hopeful drop in drug overdose deaths across the U.S.

"This is exciting," said Dr. Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute On Drug Abuse [NIDA], the federal laboratory charged with studying addiction. "This looks real. This looks very, very real."

National surveys compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already show an unprecedented decline in drug deaths of roughly 10.6 percent. That's a huge reversal from recent years when fatal overdoses regularly increased by double-digit percentages.

Some researchers believe the data will show an even larger decline in drug deaths when federal surveys are updated to reflect improvements being seen at the state level, especially in the eastern U.S.

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As flu season nears, so do new COVID-19 variants.

A newly discovered COVID strain known as XEC continues to spread rapidly across multiple countries, including the U.S.

Scripps Research’s Outbreak.info page, last updated on Sept. 5, reported 95 XEC cases across 12 U.S. states and 15 different countries.

However, Australia based data integration specialist Mike Honey wrote on X Saturday that the new strain, which emerged in Berlin last June, has shown up in hundreds more patients across 27 countries in Europe, North America and Asia.

Omicron variant KP.3.1.1, also known as deFLuQE, made up over half (52.7%) of COVID-19 cases between Sept. 1 and Sept. 14. However XEC and a variant known as MV.1 seem poised to become the next dominant strains, scientists say.

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The most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that last month nearly half of the United States have reported "very high" levels of COVID-19 activity.

As concerns with COVID have waned across the U.S., the CDC has come to rely on wastewater data to track the virus, which often lags several weeks behind current case counts.

Data collected between Aug. 25 and Aug. 31 by the CDC showed that 23 states have reported "very high" levels of wastewater viral activity nationwide. The data was published on Sept. 5.

Here are the overall numbers of the states and territories that have reported wastewater viral activity levels as of Aug. 31.

Typically, wastewater data are updated weekly and the data that is published shows the results for the prior week. However, the results can take up to five days to a week to be published online. Thus, the data from Aug. 31 is considered the most recent data.

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