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Tuesday’s results likely ensure that millions of people will be able to legally terminate a pregnancy going forward — and bolster progressives’ arguments that reproductive rights is a winning issue that Democrats and their allies should pursue aggressively in the years ahead. “There are lessons here for 2024 that I hope the administration will take to heart,” said Morgan Hopkins, the leader of All* Above All, an abortion-rights advocacy group. “We showed up, especially young voters of color, in record numbers. Now, we need these elected officials to show up for us.” (Ollstein and Messerly, 11/9)

In many places, the outcome of down-ballot races may prove as consequential for abortion access as those for governor or legislative seats. Shifts in power on state supreme courts are important to watch, as these courts can rule on challenges to new or existing abortion laws. Newly elected attorneys general will also have some say in their enforcement. (McCann, Walker, Murphy and Cahalan, 11/9)

In June, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and the court’s ultra-conservative majority wrote that they were sending the issue of abortion back to the voters. The voters are displeased. (Thomson-DeVeaux, 11/9)

KHN: Abortion Issue Helps Limit Democrats’ Losses In Midterms

Republicans are likely to take control of one or both houses of Congress when all the votes are counted, but Democrats on Wednesday were celebrating after their party defied expectations of substantial losses in the midterm election. The backlash over the Supreme Court’s decision in June to overturn 49 years of abortion rights was apparently a big reason. Inflation and the economy proved the most important voting issue, cited as the motivation of 51% of voters in exit polls conducted by the Associated Press and analyzed by KFF pollsters. But abortion was the single-most important issue for a quarter of all voters, and for a third of women under age 50. Exit polls by NBC News placed the importance of abortion even higher, with 32% of voters saying inflation was their top voting issue and abortion ranking second at 27%. (Rovner, 11/9)

In election results as of 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act constitutional referendum was failing by a nearly 18,000-vote margin. Polls closed at 8 p.m. Tuesday night and by Wednesday afternoon was at 57%, according to the Secretary of State's Office. About 75% of the vote statewide had been counted. (Michels, 11/9)

Kentucky voters rejected a ballot measure aimed at denying any constitutional protections for abortion, handing a victory to abortion-rights supporters who have seen access to the procedure eroded by Republican lawmakers in the deeply red state. The outcome of the election that concluded Tuesday highlighted what appeared to be a gap between voter sentiment and the expectations of Kentucky’s GOP-dominated legislature, which imposed a near-total ban on abortions and put the proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot. (Schreiner and Campbell, 11/9)

Nationally, abortion helped Democrats hold off the threatened “red wave,” and in states where reproductive rights were on the ballot, voters turned out and even crossed party lines to support increased access. But not in Texas. (Klibanoff, 11/9)

It was a mixed night for cannabis advocates as measures to legalize adult-use recreational marijuana passed in Maryland and Missouri but were soundly rejected in reliably red Arkansas, North Dakota and South Dakota. (Westervelt, 11/9)

If you want to understand the fickleness of pregnancy and the American laws that regulate it, one place to start would be a gas station in Iowa City, where a 31-year-old sat in the passenger seat of a gray Hyundai, making frantic calls. (Boodman, 11/10)

After a dozen meetings and sessions over the summer and fall, South Carolina efforts to pass a stricter abortion law failed Wednesday after senators rejected a House-backed proposal and House members didn’t return for another meeting to try and work out a compromise. A number of Republicans thought now was the time in South Carolina to ban almost all abortions and called a special session after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. (Collins, 11/9)

For months, abortion providers in the Metro East have described a surge in patients since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide. A national report from the Society for Family Planning has documented that increase. It notes that Illinois clinics performed nearly 30% more abortions in August than in April, even as the total number of procedures fell across the United States. (Fentem, 11/10)

"When voters have the opportunity to vote directly on abortion, they vote for their bodily autonomy and for their rights," said Lauren Blauvelt-Copelin, vice president of government affairs and public advocacy for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio. "We are confident that (Ohioans) are going to make the same decisions that their neighbors did from Kentucky to Michigan." (Balmert, 11/9)

Jane Fonda says the work of the Georgia-based nonprofit organization she founded to prevent teenage pregnancies has become “far more important” in the months since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to abortion it guaranteed to women in the United States. The activist and Oscar winner has been an outspoken critic of the court’s decision, previously calling it “unconscionable.” (Sanz, 11/9)

The World Health Organization chief on Wednesday said a nearly 90% drop in recent COVID-19 deaths globally compared to nine months ago provides “cause for optimism,” but still urged vigilance against the pandemic as variants continue to crop up. Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that last week just over 9,400 deaths linked to the coronavirus were reported to the WHO. In February of this year, he said, weekly deaths had topped 75,000 globally. (Keaten, 11/9)

Weekly COVID-19 cases and deaths continue to drop in most of the world, except for in Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific, which saw modest rises, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today in its weekly update on the pandemic. The WHO received reports of more than 2.1 million cases last week, reflecting a 15% drop from the previous week. Countries reported more than 9,400 deaths, down 10% from the week before. (Schnirring, 11/9)

High blood pressure is a known risk factor for a bout of Covid-19 severe enough to raise the specter of hospitalization and death. In fact, research has shown having high blood pressure doubles the risk of having a severe case of Covid, even if you are fully vaccinated and boosted. (LaMotte, 11/9)

An FDA advisory panel voted 5-to-8 to recommend rejecting a new drug for patients hospitalized with Covid-19, ruling that a glimmer of potential life-saving benefit couldn’t make up for a long list of questions around the company’s main trial. (Mast, 11/9)

Six months ago, Dr. Joseph Boselli said he was prescribing the antiviral drug Paxlovid to nearly everyone who turned up at his practice with COVID. Now, the internal medicine physician at Jefferson Health in Philadelphia said he's reserving it mostly for people who are 60-plus, with serious health problems, or who aren't up-to-date on their vaccines. (Abdelmalek and Flahrerty, 11/10)

The country is heading into its third Covid winter without crucial tools we’ve relied on at previous points in the pandemic, both as governments roll back their responses and as the virus outruns some of our most important medicine-cabinet defenses. (Joseph and Mast, 11/10)

A study today in JAMA Network Open reveals disparities in access to COVID-19 Test to Treat sites—and thus to illness-limiting oral antivirals—with 15% of the US population living more than an hour from the nearest center. A team led by researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital and the University of Virginia used HealthData.gov information to identify the locations of 2,227 Test to Treat sites across the United States as of May 4, 2022. They also calculated drive times from the population center of each US Census region to the 10 nearest testing sites. (Van Beusekom, 11/9)

By this point in the pandemic, a lot of people must be losing track. “I actually think this is a good thing,” says Grace Lee, a pediatrician at Stanford, and the chair of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Now that so many Americans have racked up several shots or infections, she told me, the question is no longer “‘How many doses have you gotten cumulatively?’ It’s ‘Are you up to date for the season?’” (Wu, 11/8)

Listeria has been traced to deli meats and cheese in six states, causing 16 infections and one death across six states, the CDC said Wednesday. There were seven infections in New York, three in Maryland (one of whom died), one in New Jersey, two in Massachusetts, two in Illinois and one in California from April 2021 to September 2022. (Archie, 11/10)

The number of monkeypox cases reported to the WHO rose slightly last week, with 19 countries reporting rises in cases, the head of the WHO said today at a briefing on a host of health issues. (11/9)

An alarming number of Colorado children with the respiratory virus called RSV are filling emergency rooms and intensive care beds as the state experiences an “early and intense” start to the flu season, state health officials and Children’s Hospital Colorado warned Wednesday. (Brown, 11/9)

Local public health departments are investigating a measles outbreak linked to a local child care facility. At least four cases of measles have been confirmed as part of the outbreak so far, according to both Columbus Public Health and Franklin County Public Health. Each of the four children infected were unvaccinated for the measles. (Filby, 11/9)

Three Americans on vacation in Mexico City were found dead at an Airbnb-listed property that they had rented, according to the U.S. State Department and the property rental platform. ... The woman involved had told her boyfriend before her death that she felt like she had been drugged, according to El País, which viewed messages between the couple. “Like I’ve taken ecstasy, but I haven’t,” she reportedly wrote. She was also reportedly vomiting and said she was feeling fatigued. (Jeong, 11/10)

A deadly resurgence of cholera in Haiti has claimed 136 lives so far, according to the Caribbean nation’s health ministry. Eighty-nine of the people who were infected died in a hospital or in cholera treatment centers, while 47 of them died at home, according to the Haitian Health Ministry’s statement. (Dupain, 11/9)

In a world first, two people were injected with red blood cells grown in a lab as part of a clinical trial, the research team announced this week. It’s a first step toward seeing if lab-grown blood cells are safe and work in the body — which would be a major advance for people living with rare blood types or blood disorders. (Wetsman, 11/8)

The research could eventually make a difference for people with sickle cell disease, those who develop antibodies against most donor blood types, or those with genetic disorders in which their body can’t make red blood cells or the blood cells they make don’t work well. Red blood cells are the helper cells that carry oxygen from the lungs to the body’s tissues, which use this oxygen to produce energy. The process also generates waste in the form of carbon dioxide that the red blood cells take to the lungs to be exhaled out. (Christensen, 11/9)

A toddler is thriving after doctors in the U.S. and Canada used a novel technique to treat her before she was born for a rare genetic disease that caused the deaths of two of her sisters. Ayla Bashir, a 16-month-old from Ottawa, Ontario, is the first child treated as fetus for Pompe disease, an inherited and often fatal disorder in which the body fails to make some or all of a crucial protein. (Aleccia, 11/9)

For the first time, doctors have successfully treated a fetus by infusing a crucial enzyme into its minuscule umbilical cord, halting an otherwise fatal inherited disorder known as severe infantile Pompe disease. The baby, Ayla Bashir, now 16 months old, is developing normally, giggling and babbling and toddling in her home in Ottawa. Behind the result of Ayla’s treatment, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, is a medical drama featuring passionate researchers at three medical centers and the doctors who were moved by the family’s plight. (Kolata, 11/9)

Rayyan Gorashi is keeping her options open. After all, she’s still a second-year bioengineering Ph.D. student at UC San Diego, and there are so many careers to explore. There are many jobs the 24-year-old can imagine doing. Well, except for one. “I came into grad school knowing that I do not want to go into academia. Sad as it is, it’s a tough system that doesn’t favor people who are not systemically privileged,” said Gorashi. (Wosen, 11/10)

The tiny ivory comb came from ancient ruins in central Israel and was about the size of a child’s thumb. A number of its teeth had snapped. It was so encrusted in dirt that the archaeologist who found it initially added it to a bag of assorted bones. More than half a decade later, by a stroke of luck, scientists found letters faintly inscribed on the object: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.” (Whang, 11/9)

Researchers have long known that racial and ethnic minorities are less likely to be prescribed lifesaving addiction treatment options than white people. But even when Black and Hispanic patients start a prescription for buprenorphine — the most popular medication to help those in recovery fight cravings — the typical duration of their treatment is shorter than that of white patients, according to a new data analysis published Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry. (Baumgaertner, 11/9)

Relaxed PSA screening guidelines may be leading to more late-stage cancer diagnoses, and the current recommendations updated to address this concern might preferentially serve white men, a new study suggests. (Farha, 11/10)

In the 1930s, a 23-year-old Black man was admitted to City Hospital #2 in St. Louis and, according to his death certificate, died of pneumonia shortly after. Without his consent—or his family’s—his deidentified body was included in one of the United States’s most studied collections of human remains, the Robert J. Terry Anatomical Skeletal Collection, which is now at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). Almost a century later, a team of researchers has been able to confirm the pathogen that ultimately killed him by studying the plaque on his teeth, an achievement that opens new avenues for studying diseases of the past that may leave no other mark after death. (Ortega, 11/2)

The American Medical Association (AMA) Code of Ethics urges physicians to "advocate for social, economic, educational, and political changes that ameliorate suffering and contribute to human well-being." But how achievable is that level of physician activism in today's highly divisive US society. The differing attitudes among doctors, and how those attitudes shape actions taken or avoided, are shown in the Medscape Physicians' Views on Racial Disparities Issues Report 2022. (Yasgur, 10/31)

Mindfulness meditation worked as well as a standard drug for treating anxiety in the first head-to-head comparison. The study tested a widely used mindfulness program that includes 2 1/2 hours of classes weekly and 45 minutes of daily practice at home. Participants were randomly assigned to the program or daily use of a generic drug sold under the brand name Lexapro for depression and anxiety. (Tanner, 11/9)

For the first time, scientists compared patients who took an intensive eight-week mindfulness meditation program to patients who took escitalopram, the generic name of the widely-prescribed and well-studied anxiety drug Lexapro. They found that both interventions worked equally well in reducing debilitating anxiety symptoms. (Fulton, 11/9)

Eli Lilly & Co must pay Teva Pharmaceuticals International GmbH $176.5 million after a trial to determine whether its migraine drug Emgality infringed three Teva patents, a Boston federal court jury decided on Wednesday. The jury agreed with Teva that Lilly's Emgality violated its rights in the patents, which relate to its own migraine drug Ajovy. Both drugs treat migraines by employing antibodies to inhibit headache-causing peptides. (Brittain, 11/9)

Clovis Oncology, a maker of cancer drugs, warned Wednesday that it will likely file for bankruptcy protection due to dwindling sales of its sole product, mounting financial losses, and a crushing debt load. (Feuerstein, 11/9)

Shares of Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, a shuttered drug company with no employees or any active research programs, more than doubled Wednesday because of a $225 million windfall that it will receive due to the success of a treatment for pancreatic cancer. (Feuerstein, 11/9)

Elevance, which operates Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans in 14 states, will buy BioPlus from CarepathRx, which provides pharmacy services to hospitals and is owned by Nautic Partners, a private equity firm. Elevance plans to incorporate BioPlus’ specialty services into its IngenioRx pharmacy benefit manager. (Tepper, 11/9)

North Carolina Republican legislative leaders said Wednesday that they’re shuttling the idea of Medicaid expansion to 2023, rather than attempting to negotiate a bill that could be voted on before the General Assembly’s current two-year edition ends in December. By wide bipartisan margins, the House and Senate approved competing bills months ago that were designed to cover hundreds of thousands of additional low-income adults through the government’s health insurance program that mostly serves the poor. Republicans within the two chambers have disagreed over whether additional health care access changes should be attached to expansion. (Robertson, 11/9)

KHN: South Dakota Voters Approved Medicaid Expansion, But Implementation May Not Be Easy

South Dakotans voted Tuesday to expand the state’s Medicaid program to cover thousands of additional low-income residents, becoming the seventh state to approve expansion via the ballot box. But as other conservative states have shown, voter approval doesn’t always mean politicians and administrators will rush to implement the change. (Zionts, 11/10)

KHN: Stopping The Churn: Why Some States Want To Guarantee Medicaid Coverage From Birth To Age 6 

Before the covid-19 public health emergency began in 2020, millions of children churned on and off Medicaid each year — an indication that many were losing coverage because of administrative problems, rather than because their family’s income had increased and made them ineligible. Spurred by pandemic-era lessons, several states are rethinking their enrollment policies for the youngest Medicaid members. Oregon is leading the way after getting federal approval to implement a new continuous-enrollment policy. (Galewitz, 11/10)

Colorado and Idaho are joining a handful of other states in opting out of a long-running CDC survey that tracks teenagers' mental health. Experts fear the states' exclusion will compromise the country's ability to monitor concerning behaviors among high schoolers as the youth mental health crisis only deepens. (VandenEinde, 11/9)

Federal health officials are conducting a new study to determine whether veterans once stationed at a now-shuttered California military base were exposed to dangerously high levels of cancer-causing toxins. The decision by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention comes nine months after an Associated Press investigation found that drinking water at Fort Ord contained toxic chemicals and that hundreds of veterans who lived at the central California coast base in the 1980s and 1990s later developed rare and terminal blood cancers. (Mendoza, Linderman and Dearen, 11/9)

“(R)ather than employ the existing tools at its disposal, the State has taken a blunt instrument to the entire profession,” ACLU attorneys said in a filing Monday in federal court in Los Angeles, where the doctors’ lawsuit is awaiting judicial review. (Egelko, 11/9)

KHN: Fentanyl In High School: A Texas Community Grapples With The Reach Of The Deadly Opioid

The hallways of Lehman High School looked like any other on a recent fall day. Its 2,100 students talked and laughed as they hurried to their next classes, moving past walls covered with flyers that advertised homecoming events, clubs, and football games. Next to those flyers, though, were posters with a grim message warning students that fentanyl is extremely deadly. Those posters weren’t there last school year. Right before this school year started, the Hays Consolidated Independent School District, which includes Lehman, announced that two students had died after taking fentanyl-laced pills. They were the first recorded student deaths tied to the synthetic opioid in this Central Texas school district, which has high school campuses in Kyle and Buda, a nearby town. Within the first month of school, two more fatalities were confirmed. (DeGuzman, 11/10)

KHN: Homelessness Among Older People Is On The Rise, Driven By Inflation And The Housing Crunch

On a recent rainy afternoon in this small town just outside Glacier National Park, Lisa Beaty and Kim Hilton were preparing to sell most of their belongings before moving out of their three-bedroom, two-bathroom rental home. Hilton, who was recovering from a broken leg, watched from his recliner as friends and family sorted through old hunting gear, jewelry, furniture, and clothes. “The only thing that’s not for sale is the house — everything else has to go,” Hilton, 68, said as he checked his blood sugar. (Bolton, 11/10)

Some patients who have recovered from an infection have reported transient or even lasting cognitive dysfunction. (Venkataramani, Ph.D., and Winkler, M.D., Ph,D., 11/10)

Using an innovative technology that enables imaging of two individuals during live and natural conditions, researchers have identified specific brain areas in the dorsal parietal region of the brain associated with the social symptomatology of autism. (Yale University, 11/9)

Monkeypox virus was first isolated in late 1958 in Copenhagen during two outbreaks of a smallpox-like disease in a colony of cynomolgus monkeys.1 No clinical signs were noted before the eruptive phase of the disease, which was characterized by a maculopapular rash. (Gessain, M.D., Nakoune, Ph.D., and Yazdanpanah, M.D., 11/10)

A thermal-imaging tool to screen for chronic wounds could enable nurses to identify these hard-to-heal sores during the first assessment at a person's home. (RMIT University, 11/9)

After decades of failure, weight loss drugs seem finally poised to become big pharma’s newest blockbuster category. (Lisa Jarvis, 11/9)

The World Health Organization defines mental health as a state of mental well-being in which people cope well with the many stresses of life, can realize their own potential, function productively and fruitfully, and contribute to their communities. By that standard, health care workers are in deep trouble. (Rawan Hamadeh, 11/10)

Every year, medical residents face increasing levels of stress and burnout. The demanding nature of the job coupled with the pressure to succeed, crippling debt and inadequate pay can be overwhelming. (Onome Oboh, 11/9)

As physicians whose practices incorporate the entire spectrum, from primary care to surgery, we hear stories from our patients daily about how difficult it is to access high-quality healthcare. (Drs. Tochi Iroku-Malize, Patricia Turner and Ryan Mire, 11/9)

Household air pollution from incomplete combustion of these fuels is a mixture of fine particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and other substances and is associated with adverse health consequences, resulting in an estimated 2.3 million premature deaths annually. (Blair J. Wylie M.D., M.P.H., and Kwaku P. Asante, M.B., Ch.B, M.P.H., Ph.D., 11/10)