Sunday, Feb 01st
Last update09:33:59 AM GMT
Health Glance
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo is raising alarms about what he sees as the risk of potential cancer posed by COVID vaccines.
Ladapo, who rose to national prominence during the pandemic for spreading misinformation about the virus and promoting vaccination hesitancy, is asking the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to answer questions about his concerns regarding DNA integration in mRNA vaccines.
An obesity drug called Zepbound won approval for use in adults from the Food and Drug Administration Wednesday, ushering in a new rival to Novo Nordisk's blockbuster Wegovy.
Eli Lilly & Co., maker of Zepbound, says it shows greater weight loss at a lower list price than Wegovy. The Lilly drug will be available in the U.S. by the end of the year. A version of the shot, known generically as tirezepatide, is already sold as Mounjaro to treat Type 2 diabetes.
The Lilly drug works by acting on two hormone receptors in the brain, including one called GLP-1, short for glucagon-like peptide-1 – that regulate appetite and metabolism.
The new class of medicines for managing obesity that includes Zepbound and Wegovy has given people with obesity and overweight a potent option for treatment. But the drugs are expensive, and many people who lose weight regain it after stopping the medicines.
The US chemical industry likely spent over $110m during the last two election cycles deploying lobbyists to kill dozens of pieces of PFAS legislation and slow administrative regulation around “forever chemicals”, a new analysis of federal lobbying documents has found.
The industry’s onslaught was effective: only eight pieces of legislation that targeted PFAS made it through Congress, the paper prepared by the Food and Water Watch (FWW) nonprofit found.
“There’s an extreme amount of money that’s going into fighting [PFAS legislation],” said Amanda Starbuck, FWW’s research director and the lead author on the report. “It’s hard to win these fights when there’s so much funding being put in from the opposing side.”
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An abortion rights advocacy group filed lawsuits in three states on Tuesday on behalf of women who say they were denied abortions despite suffering life-threatening pregnancy complications.
The Center for Reproductive Rights sued on behalf of eight women and four doctors in Idaho, Tennessee and Oklahoma, three states that have passed some of the strictest abortion bans since the U.S. Supreme Court gutted federal abortion rights by overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022.
The lawsuits follow a similar case brought by the center in Texas, where a judge last month sided with five women who were denied abortions and exempted women experiencing pregnancy complications from Texas' stringent abortion ban.
The lawsuits in Idaho and Tennessee ask the state courts to clarify those states' legal exceptions for abortions in cases of medical emergencies, so that doctors may perform abortions when they deem them necessary without fear of prosecution.
For Pat Bennett, 68, every spoken word is a struggle.
Bennett has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a degenerative disease that has disabled the nerve cells controlling her vocal and facial muscles. As a result, her attempts to speak sound like a series of grunts.
But in a lab at Stanford University, an experimental brain-computer interface is able to transform Bennett's thoughts into easily intelligible sentences, like, "I am thirsty," and "bring my glasses here."
The system is one of two described in the journal Nature that use a direct connection to the brain to restore speech to a person who has lost that ability. One of the systems even simulates the user's own voice and offers a talking avatar on a computer screen.
The punishing heatwaves that have scorched much of the US could result in a record number of heat-related deaths this year, experts have warned, amid a spike in hospitalizations from collapsing workers.
Among those needing hospital treatment are heat-exhausted hikers and even people who have suffered severe burns from touching blistering concrete and asphalt.
Heat is the leading weather-related cause of mortalities in the US, outpacing deaths from hurricanes by a factor of eight to one, and this summer’s record-breaking temperatures, worsened by the human-caused climate crisis, have led to fears a new annual high death toll will be set in 2023.
Advocates for abortion rights in Ohio say they’ve submitted nearly twice the number of signatures required to put a measure on the ballot enshrining abortion access in the state’s constitution.
Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights, the umbrella group behind the effort, submitted more than 700,000 signatures to the Ohio Secretary of State’s office, which will now determine whether at least 413,487 of those signatures are legitimate. If enough are valid, voters will decide on the matter in Ohio’s general election in November.
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