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All of these factors create conditions ripe for human illness. Diseases old and new are becoming more prevalent and even cropping up in places they’ve never been found before. Researchers have begun piecing together a patchwork of evidence that illuminates the formidable threat climate-driven diseases currently pose to human health — and the scope of the dangers to come. “This is not just something off in the future,” Neil Vora, a physician with the nonprofit Conservation International, said. “Climate change is here. People are suffering and dying right now.” (Teirstein, 7/18)

A global pattern of heat waves scorching parts of Europe, Asia and the United States intensified on Tuesday, with the World Meteorological Organization warning of an increased risk of deaths linked to excessively high temperatures. Americans were facing a medley of extreme weather, from blazing heat from Texas to Southern California to smoke-choked air wafting into the Midwest from Canada's wildfires. Flood warnings were up for Vermont towns that were inundated just last week, while Tropical Storm Calvin was expected to hit the Pacific island state of Hawaii later on Tuesday. (Salgado, 7/18)

A strengthening El Niño is pushing temperatures in countries around the world to record highs this month, exacerbating unprecedented heat waves and triggering deadly storms in ways that scientists say wouldn’t be possible without the influence of climate change. (Tigue, 7/18)

As global warming intensifies and deadly heatwaves spread across the world, becoming the “new normal,” the World Meteorological Organization is calling on governments to adopt heat action plans to protect “hundreds of thousands of people dying from preventable heat-related causes each year.” (Schlein, 7/18)

With excessive heat advisories in effect across the U.S., here's how to avoid heat-related illnesses. (Aubrey, 7/18)

With several states experiencing punishing temperatures, some lawmakers want to treat extreme heat the same as other natural disasters. It's just one of several proposals on Capitol Hill in response to rising temperatures and their toll on people. As heat waves intensify, so does the attention on action from Congress. (Alvey, 7/18)

The heat wave baking Southern California not only raises the risk of wildfires and heat-related illness but could bring another hardship: bad air quality. The South Coast Air Quality Management District issued an air quality alert for inland areas of the South Coast Air Basin and the Coachella Valley because of elevated levels of ozone likely to cause poor air quality during the afternoon and early evening. The alert took effect Friday at 2 p.m. and continues until Tuesday at 8 p.m. (Lin, 7/18)

Smoke from wildfires in Canada that pushed deep into the United States this week has reached new areas in the South, including in North Carolina and Georgia, that had mostly escaped the toxic drift blowing in from the fires in June, officials said. “Horrific up here!” Merry Miller Weis, a 70-year-old resident in the Western North Carolina mountains, wrote in an email to state climate scientists. “The mountains aren’t even visible. This is the absolute worst since the beginning of the Canadian fires.” (Hauser, 7/18)

Millions of American workers have breathed in dangerous levels of air pollution this year as smoke from Canada’s record wildfire season blankets cities across the Northeast. Now experts are calling on federal regulators to adopt standards protecting outdoor workers from worsening air quality, potentially modeled after the few states that have such standards, including California and Oregon. (Dewey, 7/18)

The District of Columbia has sued at least 25 companies over "forever chemical" contamination, following the detection of low levels of multiple PFAS in the district's drinking water. The lawsuit filed Tuesday in the civil division of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia adds the nation's capital to a list of local governments that have sued major companies that manufactured PFAS-containing firefighting foam — despite knowing about the product's environmental and health harms. (Borst, 7/18)

Water testing from coast to coast indicates the widespread presence of "forever chemicals," bolstering calls from advocates who want to see the Biden administration accelerate its crackdown on the compounds. Testing conducted by the Environmental Working Group and released Tuesday shows PFAS cropping up in drinking water across 18 states, with the chemicals appearing both in large metro areas and smaller communities. And while some samples indicated only traces of the compounds, others yielded elevated levels of certain chemicals including some set for regulation under an advancing EPA plan. (Crunden, 7/18)

Both cancer-linked “forever chemicals” and certain compounds used in plastic production may be associated with a heightened risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes, a new study from the University of California, San Francisco has found. Exposure to these substances — which are all widespread in the San Francisco region — could carry an increased threat of gestational diabetes, life-threatening preeclampsia and pregnancy hypertension in Bay Area individuals, according to the study, published on Wednesday in Environmental Health Perspectives. (Udasin, 7/18)

Toxic “forever chemicals” are all over your home. But filtering your water can reduce your exposure. (Reddy, 7/18)

Whether Missouri voters get a chance weigh in on legalizing abortion is now up to state Supreme Court judges, who on Tuesday heard arguments in a case about Republican infighting that has stalled the amendment’s progress. Judges did not indicate when they might rule on the case, which centers around a proposed amendment to enshrine in the constitution the individual right to make decisions about abortion, childbirth and birth control. Abortion-rights supporters proposed it after the state banned almost all abortions last summer. (Ballentine, 7/18)

The state’s highest court heard arguments Tuesday about how much authority state offices have over the initiative ballot petition process. Attorney General Andrew Bailey and Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick are at odds about the amount of power each has over a fiscal note that estimates how much a proposed amendment adding abortion rights to Missouri’s constitution would cost the state. (Kellogg, 7/18)

Patients seeking out-of-state abortions and gender-affirming care are at risk of increased surveillance from law enforcement, according to a new report. The Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) released a report Tuesday detailing the elevated dangers for patients who travel for abortions or gender-affirming care. (Nazarro, 7/18)

Louisiana’s Republican-dominated Legislature overturned Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards’ recent veto of a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors on Tuesday. Louisiana, where the ban is scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2024, will join 20 other states that have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming medical care, which includes puberty-blockers, hormone treatment and gender-reassignment surgery. Most of those states face now lawsuits, and in some places the bans have been temporarily blocked by federal judges. (Cline, 7/18)

A federal judge is considering Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s arguments that a new Kansas law rolling back transgender rights doesn’t bar the state from changing the sex listing on transgender people’s birth certificates. U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree ruled Tuesday that Kelly’s office can defend her administration’s policy of changing birth certificates and accepted its “friend of the court” arguments. The state’s Republican attorney general, Kris Kobach, argues that a law that took effect July 1 prohibits such changes and requires the state to undo previous ones. (Hanna, 7/18)

House Republicans voted Tuesday to eliminate funding to three LGBTQ community centers during a contentious House Appropriations subcommittee meeting that one member characterized as “political theater.” Tensions boiled over Tuesday after Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) introduced an amendment to the annual funding bill covering the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development to eliminate $3.62 million in funding for three LGBTQ community centers in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. (Migdon, 7/18)

Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) sued the U.S. government on Tuesday, becoming the latest drugmaker seeking to block a program that gives the Medicare government health insurance plan the power to negotiate lower drug prices. The pharmaceutical industry says the drug price negotiation program under President Joe Biden's signature Inflation Reduction Act law will curtail profits and compel drugmakers to curb development of groundbreaking new treatments. (7/18)

“The IRA breaks the agreement at the heart of the patent and regulatory laws: when companies invest and succeed at developing innovative new treatments, they are awarded time-limited and constitutionally protected rights in their innovation,” J&J said in its release. (Choi, 7/18)

Biden administration officials asked executives from major drug and retail chains to counter stiff opposition from the pharmaceutical industry and help promote a law intended to lower drug costs. (Griffin, 7/18)

After acute health problems that kept her away from Washington for months earlier this year, Sen. Dianne Feinstein is now engaged in a legal effort to gain more control of the finances from her late husband’s trust. The 90-year-old senator filed a petition asking a court to make her daughter, Katherine Feinstein, a successor trustee of Richard Blum’s trust, arguing that the people serving as trustees “have refused to make distributions to reimburse Senator Feinstein’s medical expenses.” (Oreskes, 7/18)

The Biden administration is taking steps to impose a 10-year ban on funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Chinese research laboratory at the center of a heated debate over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a memo made public by a House subcommittee on Tuesday evening and an official familiar with the issue. (Gay Stolberg, 7/18)

The Biden administration formally halted the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s access to US funding, citing unanswered safety and security questions for the facility at the center of the Covid lab leak theory. The Department of Health and Human Services notified the institute about the suspension on Monday and told the lab it’s seeking to cut it off permanently, according to a memo obtained by Bloomberg News. An HHS review that started in September raised concern that the facility based in Wuhan, where Covid first emerged, is violating biosafety protocols and isn’t complying with US regulations. (Griffin, 7/18)

Citing whistleblower testimony, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) is holding up the nominee to the No. 2 position at the VA, he said Tuesday on the Senate floor. Grassley has said that Tanya Bradsher, the VA’s chief of staff, failed to properly oversee a correspondence system that Grassley believes mishandled veterans’ personal health information. (Leonard, 7/18)

Senate health committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) added three drug shortage measures to a pandemic-preparedness bill that his committee will consider Thursday. Only one of them, however, would grant the Food and Drug Administration new authorities to tackle the issue. Congress is under pressure to stem drug shortages amid reports of doctors rationing chemotherapies and other essential medicines. (Wilkerson, 7/18)

Senators will likely attach a measure to crack down on opioid trafficking and a provision that would require banking regulators to report on their use of artificial intelligence to the National Defense Authorization Act, according to a near-final manager’s agreement viewed Tuesday. (Mueller, 7/18)

Medicaid is an essential source of maternal and postpartum care for low-income Americans, covering 42% of births in the U.S. People who give birth receive maternity care until at least two months after delivery, or longer depending on state or local policies. But many immigrants don’t have access to this coverage, making them more vulnerable to maternal health problems, as highlighted by a new study of nearly 73,000 postpartum people across 19 states and New York City between 2012 and 2019. (Merelli, 7/18)

Border Patrol does not have protocols for assessing medical needs of children with preexisting conditions, according to an independent report made public Tuesday on the death of an 8-year-old girl from Panama who was in federal custody. The girl’s death was “a preventable tragedy that resulted from” failures in “medical and custodial systems for children” within U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency that includes the Border Patrol, the report found. (Cruz and Gonzalez, 7/19)

Rep. Linda Sánchez (D-Calif.) discussed the U.S.’s rapidly aging population and its potential strain on Medicare during a Tuesday morning event. Sánchez referred to the growing population of Americans more than 65 years old as a “gray tsunami” during The Hill’s More than Memory Loss: Caring for those with Alzheimer’s event, sponsored by Otsuka. Bob Cusack, The Hill’s editor in chief, moderated the event. (Kelly, 7/18)

Victims of opioid addiction are objecting to the U.S. government’s request to send Purdue Pharma’s pending bankruptcy plan for review before the Supreme Court, which would delay long-awaited disbursements under a $6 billion settlement for addiction victims and state governments. (Saeedy, 7/18)

�������ýҕ�l Health News: Listen To The Latest ‘�������ýҕ�l Health News Minute’

“�������ýҕ�l Health News Minute” brings original health care and health policy reporting from the �������ýҕ�l Health News newsroom to the airwaves each week. (7/18)

Teladoc Health is expanding a partnership with Microsoft to use the tech giant's artificial intelligence services to automate clinical documentation on the telehealth platform, lifting its shares 6% in premarket trade. The integration of AI including Microsoft's services with technology from OpenAI, owner of viral chatbot ChatGPT, will help ease the burden on healthcare staff during virtual exams, Teladoc said on Tuesday. (7/18)

Teladoc Health is adding Nuance's voice-enabled generative artificial intelligence solution to help its providers with documentation, the companies said on Tuesday. Under the agreement, Teladoc clinicians will use Nuance’s Dragon Ambient eXperience Express generative AI tools to automatically produce clinical visit notes. Nuance, owned by tech giant Microsoft, said the tool can summarize and enter conversations between clinicians and patients directly into electronic health record systems using OpenAI's GPT-4 generative AI capabilities. (Turner, 7/18)

New bipartisan legislation proposed by Senators Ed Markey, D-MA, and Ted Budd, R-NC, on Tuesday would push the Department of Health and Human Services to take a more active role in studying the potential biosecurity risks created by artificial intelligence. (Heilweil, 7/18)

Thanks to artificial intelligence, we will soon be able to predict our risk of developing serious health conditions later in life, at the press of a button. Abdominal aortic calcification, or AAC, is a calcification which can build up within the walls of the abdominal aorta and predicts your risk of developing cardiovascular disease events such as heart attacks and stroke. It also predicts your risk of falls, fractures and late-life dementia. Conveniently, common bone density machine scans used to detect osteoporosis, can also detect AAC. (7/17)

UMC Health System is the latest healthcare organization to incorporate artificial intelligence into its operations. It’s one of the few to use it to detect guns. The health system in Lubbock, Texas, is adding an AI-based video analytics platform onto its existing security system that will detect, without using facial recognition software, whether someone is carrying a gun, said Jeff Hill, the system's vice president of operations. If the system from ZeroEyes detects a weapon, it will alert someone at ZeroEyes, who will determine whether a real threat exists. If so, UMC security staff at the hospital will be notified, he said. (Perna, 7/18)

Even as the agency prepares to roll out a menthol cigarette ban later this summer, the FDA’s bar for authorizing less-harmful menthol e-cigarettes to help smokers quit is so high that it may be impossible to reach. That’s the upshot of communications from the FDA to Logic, a major e-cigarette maker, and comments from former FDA officials and public health experts, who worry the impact of a menthol cigarette ban may fall far short of its desired effect. The communications are in documents obtained by POLITICO through a Freedom of Information request. (Ellen Foley, 7/18)

For 25 years, some of California’s best-known early childhood services have been funded by an almost ironic source: Taxes on cigarettes and other tobacco products. That was the deal voters made when they passed Proposition 10 in 1998, levying a tobacco tax and dedicating the money for programs that would help families with young children. The arrangement was never supposed to last forever. Advocates for youth services have known from the beginning that fewer people would smoke over time, and the funding would fall. (Ibarra, 7/18)

The use of e-cigarettes was found to have a negative impact on the heart and lungs as the American Heart Association (AHA) calls for further research into the issue. “E-cigarettes deliver numerous substances into the body that are potentially harmful, including chemicals and other compounds that are likely not known to or understood by the user,” volunteer chair of the AHA scientific statement writing committee Jason Rose said in a new scientific statement released Monday. (Sforza, 7/18)

Johnson & Johnson was ordered by a California jury on Tuesday to pay $18.8 million to a man who said in a lawsuit that he developed cancer due to exposure to its baby powder, per Reuters. J&J said it will appeal the decision. Why it matters: J&J is seeking to settle lawsuits from cancer survivors and their families who allege the company's talc-based powder caused their illness while denying that this is the case. (Falconer, 7/18)

Jurors in state court in state court in Oakland concluded Tuesday that J&J’s baby powder helped cause Anthony Hernandez Valadez’s mesothelioma, a specific type of cancer linked to asbestos exposure. Due to Valadez’s failing health, the case was cleared for trial as an exception to a court order putting all litigation on hold after J&J sought to wall off its talc liability in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. (Feeley, 7/18)

An agreement between the Stop TB Partnership and pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson (J&J) will expand access to a key component of the shorter drug regimen for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). Under the agreement, which was announced last week, J&J granted Stop TB Partnership's Global Drug Facility (GDF) licenses that will enable it to "tender, procure, and supply" generic versions of Sirturo (bedaquiline) for most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including those in which the drug is still under patent. Bedaquiline is part of the 6-month regimens that are recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) for treating MDR-TB. (Dall, 7/18)

Flagship Pioneering, a Cambridge firm that creates and funds biotech startups, said Tuesday that it struck a partnership with pharma giant Pfizer to jointly launch drug programs and bankroll new experimental medicines. Under the deal, the two firms will each invest $50 million in 10 drug programs, drawing on technology in the portfolios of the 40-plus startups backed by Flagship. Pfizer, the world’s largest drug company by 2022 revenue, will have the option to acquire each of the jointly funded programs. (Weisman, 7/18)

U.S. drugmaker Pfizer (PFE.N) and venture firm Flagship Pioneering on Tuesday said they would invest $100 million together to develop up to 10 new potential drugs for areas including internal medicine, oncology, infectious diseases and immunology. Flagship, which has incubated biotech companies, most famously Moderna Inc (MRNA.O), and Pfizer will each invest $50 million. Flagship's drug discovery initiative Pioneering Medicines will lead the exploration process. (7/18)

A Delaware federal judge on Monday threw out a $45 million damages award for genetic testing company CareDx (CDNA.O) in a false-advertising case against rival Natera (NTRA.O). U.S. District Judge Colm Connolly said the jury award was unjustified because there was no evidence that Natera's allegedly misleading advertisements about its Prospera tests for kidney-transplant patients deceived customers. (Brittain, 7/18)

Softbank-backed Neumora Therapeutics' experimental drug navacaprant has helped reduce symptoms of depression in patients with moderate-to-severe forms of the disorder in a mid-stage trial, the company said on Tuesday. Neumora, whose investors include SoftBank Vision Fund and Amgen (AMGN.O), said it would begin late-stage studies of the drug in some patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). (7/18)

The digital-health platform Noom is choosing a veteran technology executive to lead the company, as it looks to seize on surging interest in weight-loss treatments and wellness among consumers. (Cutter, 7/18)

University Hospital is “functionally obsolete” and the state would need to pick up the tab for much of the hospital’s proposed $1.8 billion renovation, according to a report commissioned by the Economic Development Authority. (7/18)

Encompass Health and the University of Maryland Medical System will own and operate an inpatient rehabilitation hospital through a joint venture announced Tuesday. Birmingham, Alabama-based Encompass Health has focused on building inpatient rehabilitation hospitals and pursuing joint ventures with health systems in recent years. This is the first venture between the two organizations. Financial terms were not disclosed. (Berryman, 7/18)

Efforts to move dialysis care into the home are gaining traction, three years after then-President Donald Trump set a goal of having 80% of newly diagnosed kidney failure patients receive transplants or home dialysis by 2025. Last year, 26.6% of Medicare beneficiaries with end-stage renal disease were receiving dialysis, compared with 13.3% in 2020, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. (Eastabrook, 7/18)

College graduates could soon learn nursing at the University of Pennsylvania without getting a second bachelor’s degree. The new master’s in professional nursing will train students who already have a bachelor’s degree in other fields and prepare them for the registered nurse licensing exam, or NCLEX. (Gutman, 7/18)

A southwest Florida county has document a seventh case of malaria, state authorities said. The Florida Department of Health reported a new locally acquired case of malaria in Sarasota County during the week of July 9-15. That’s in addition to five cases last month and one case in May. (7/19)

Malaria was considered eliminated from the U.S. by 1951, but the country gets around 2,000 cases annually, nearly all among people who had traveled outside the U.S. Dr. Monica Parise, the director of the CDC’s Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria, said malaria outbreaks in the U.S. have historically been “relatively small and contained.” The outbreak in Sarasota County fits the pattern, she said. (Bendix and Alexander, 7/18)

In its latest weekly arbovirus report, the Florida Department of Health confirmed one more local malaria case as well as one more local dengue infection. The report covers mosquito-borne illness activity for the week ending July 15. The malaria case involves a resident of Sarasota County, where the earlier locally acquired cases occurred. The new case lifts the number of local cases for the year to seven. Texas also reported a local malaria case this year, which involved someone from Cameron County. (Schnirring, 7/18)

In addition, the year's third case of dengue was confirmed in Miami-Dade. Sarasota, Manatee and Miami-Dade counties are under a mosquito-borne illness alert. Health officials have confirmed one new case of locally acquired malaria in north Sarasota County this past week, for a total of seven this year. (Mayer, 7/18)

A dangerous new strain of fentanyl — fluorofentanyl — was found in dozens of overdose deaths in San Francisco last year while a concerning new street drug called xylazine — commonly known as “tranq” — was present in more than a dozen cases, according to a new report from the medical examiner. Fluorofentanyl, which can range from half to five times as powerful as prescribed fentanyl, was found in 45 deaths, while xylazine, a veterinary tranquilizer not intended for human consumption, was identified in 15 cases. Different kinds of fentanyl were found in 12 cases. All tranq cases also contained fentanyl. (Moench, 7/18)

The presence of a harmful algal bloom has been detected in the Virgin River through a part of St. George. The Utah Department of Environmental Quality announced Friday that the presence of a bloom was found in a segment of the Virgin River between the area of the RV Rental Pad senior community and Mall Drive Bridge. (Kessler, 7/18)

A toxic bloom of blue-green algae is blossoming across Lake Okeechobee in Florida, leading to health warnings and the closure of parts of a local marina. The bloom was thought to have spread across 380 square miles of the lake as of June 12. It is Florida's largest freshwater lake, and the 10th-largest natural freshwater lake in the U.S. (Thomson, 7/18)

For years, the public hasn't known much about the full scope of medical misdiagnoses that happen in the U.S., according to a new report released by the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute Center for Diagnostic Excellence. Until now, estimates of annual incorrect diagnoses have varied widely, the report says. Now, researchers say an estimated 371,000 patients die and 424,000 are permanently disabled each year because they are incorrectly diagnosed across a range of medical care settings — not just in the family doctor's office. (Thornton, 7/18)

Arlington, Va. and Washington, D.C. topped a ranking of America’s fittest cities released Tuesday, with Wichita and Oklahoma City taking up the rear among the 100 largest U.S. cities. The 16th annual American Fitness Index is a collaboration between the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) and the Elevance Health Foundation. The index uses census and city-provided data surrounding 34 fitness indicators to rank the 100 largest U.S. cities. (Roseborough, 7/18)

The US medical and public health communities should work together to combat online health misinformation through sustainable investments in media monitoring and counter messaging, according to a Harvard Medical School–led research team. Their report, published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine, describes how to address untruths such as the social media rumors that undermined trust in science during the COVID-19 pandemic. (7/18)

�������ýҕ�l Health News: Once The New Over-The-Counter Birth Control Pill Is Available, What About Cost And Coverage?

Last week, the FDA approved Opill, the first daily oral contraceptive that will be available for sale over the counter in stores as well as online. Reproductive health advocates hailed the groundbreaking approval as a step that can help millions of people avoid pregnancy, which is unintended nearly half the time in the United States. They long have argued that eliminating the often-time-consuming step of requiring people to get a prescription before they can get birth control pills would expand access and give people more control over their contraceptive decisions. (Andrews, 7/19)

North Carolina began kicking Medicaid participants off the rolls last month for the first time in more than three years, initiating a purge that experts fear will leave an untold number of residents without health insurance — even if they remain eligible for the program. People enrolled in Medicaid had been protected by a federal provision that prevented states from discontinuing coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic. That meant that anyone who was deemed eligible for the combined state- and federally funded program starting in March 2020 remained on the program, ballooning North Carolina’s overall enrollment. (Baxley, 7/19)

California state regulators announced on Tuesday their plans to cap orphaned oil wells across the state, including wells in a South Central residential neighborhood near USC that caused health complaints from residents for years. The effort is part of a new push to close problem sites that have posed health risks to communities across the state, oftentimes disadvantaged neighborhoods in close proximity to oil drill sites. California Gov. Gavin Newsom earmarked $100 million in the state budget to address the issue. (Solis and Martinez, 7/18)

Cost of living and housing affordability are the top concerns of Coloradans this year, according to a poll released by the Colorado Health Foundation. In an open-ended question asking participants what they thought the most important issue facing Colorado is right now, 16% answered cost of living and 15% answered housing affordability. Other issues in the top five were government and politics, public safety and crime, and homelessness. (Yamasaki, 7/18)

Non-compete agreements in job contracts are reducing health care access and affordability, a group of physicians, surgeons and lawyers told U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., at a roundtable conversation in New Britain Tuesday. In Connecticut, two major health systems — Hartford HealthCare and Yale New Haven Health — own most of the state’s hospitals and many of its physician practices, and health care professionals who work for one system under non-compete agreements are limited if they want to find a new position with another provider. (Phillips, 7/19)

The Minneapolis City Council will vote on a new contract this week for the city's behavioral crisis response (BCR) team — that's a group of mental health workers who respond to some 911 mental health crisis calls instead of police. The team received a pat on the back from the U.S. Department of Justice last month in its investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department. Mental health workers have responded to 12,000 calls since December 2021. (Wurzer and Brown, 7/18)

San Jose Water failed to report and conduct a formal investigation into an E. coli sample discovered at one of its wells, according to San Jose City Councilmember Rosemary Kamei. In an emailed communication sent out Tuesday afternoon, Kamei said the bacteria was detected on May 5 from a routine sample at one of the water utility company’s groundwater sites. The well was immediately taken offline while a follow-up sample was drawn and the water was not delivered to any resident’s homes, Kamei said. (Greschler, 7/18)

Members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians will vote in September on whether they want to legalize marijuana possession and sales on tribal lands for anyone 21 and older — not just for those seeking it for medical use that the North Carolina tribe had already authorized. The Tribal Council agreed last week to place the question on the ballot during the tribe’s Sept. 7 general election. (7/18)

Another experimental Alzheimer’s drug can modestly slow patients’ inevitable worsening — by about four to seven months, researchers reported Monday. (Neergaard, 7/17)

With yet a third new Alzheimer's drug expected to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the field is beginning to show progress in the fight to slow the disease. (University of California - San Francisco, 7/17)

Data scientists have created an artificial intelligence model that may more accurately predict which existing medicines, not currently classified as harmful, may in fact lead to congenital disabilities. (The Mount Sinai Hospital / Mount Sinai School of Medicine, 7/17)

A new study published in JAMA finds that fewer than one in five US nursing home residents received evidenced-based treatment with monoclonal antibodies or oral antiviral drugs for COVID-19, despite being at high risk for poor outcomes. The rate had improved to one in four by late 2022. (Van Beusekom, 7/17)

For the first time, researchers have calculated excess deaths among US dementia patients during the pandemic, and they found a reduction in excess mortality among long-term care residents after COVID-19 vaccines were made available. (Soucheray, 7/17)

An agreement between the Stop TB Partnership and pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson (J&J) will expand access to a key component of the shorter drug regimen for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB). (Dall, 7/18)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that close to a million people have died from opiate overdoses since 1999. That is so many deaths, it has contributed to a decline of the national life expectancy age. (Dr. Thomas K. Lew, 7/18)

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration made the progesterone-based Opill (norgestrel) the first hormonal contraceptive approved for over-the-counter sale. Many advocates are celebrating the decision as another landmark triumph for reproductive rights. But in a country with countless obstacles to abortion access — including total or near-total abortion bans in 16 states — the advent of a nonprescription birth control pill is a hollow victory. (Christine Henneberg, 7/19)

Last Thursday, the Food and Drug Administration made it as easy to get the birth control pill Opill as a bottle of Tylenol. Going forward, Opill will be available over the counter, without a prescription. (Kathryn Kolbert, 7/18)

What can’t psychedelic drugs do? Research suggests they can help with depression, anxiety and addiction. Anecdotal experience suggests they can help you pretend to enjoy an outdoor-camping-slash-music festival. (7/15)

Amid so much discouraging news about reproductive health access in the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise, the announcement by the Food and Drug Administration on Thursday that it was approving Opill, a daily oral contraceptive, for over-the-counter sale to people of all ages, felt like a breath of fresh air. (Daniel Grossman, 7/19)

This summer, the climate crisis has brought intense heat and toxic wildfire smoke to much of the country. These conditions are threats to us all, but they are particularly lethal to those who work outside, in the nation’s fields or construction sites, and even to some who work indoors. (David Michaels, 7/18)

As smoke from Canadian wildfires continues to endanger public health and cause hardship for tens of millions of people of all ages from New York to Missouri, we are painfully reminded of Maria Alvarez, a home care worker in Santa Paula, California. Several years ago, during the devastating Thomas Fire, Maria kept her disabled son, who depended on a ventilator, alive by manually pressing on his chest and lifting his head while the raging wildfire engulfed her community with smoke and left her without power for days. (Ben Jealous and Mary Kay Henry, 7/18)

Republican lawmakers in my home state of Arizona have tried to impose a Civil War-era law that bans most abortions. Doctors would face criminal penalties for performing the procedure, even if the pregnancy were the result of rape or incest. It frightens me what would happen if they succeeded. (Sophia Rick Yudell, 7/19)

The HPV vaccine is, in short, a life-saver. By preventing several types of cancer, it can save thousands of U.S. lives each year. But too many children aren’t getting it. (Eddy Bresnitz, 7/18)