They’re marketed as healthy, “dietitian-approved” meals and delivered directly to the homes of people seriously ill from cancer, diabetes, or heart disease: a Jimmy Dean frozen sausage breakfast sandwich, biscuits and gravy, a cheeseburger.

These are among the offerings sold by an Idaho-based company, Homestyle Direct, which is paid millions of dollars each year by taxpayer-funded state Medicaid programs to deliver what the company calls medically tailored meals. The company, which advertises delivering 7.8 million meals annually, has menus catering to customers trying to manage their cancer and diabetes, as well as “heart healthy” and “renal friendly” dishes.

However, multiple nutrition experts told STAT that many of Homestyle Direct’s offerings fall far short of what they’d consider medically tailored meals, a class of foods that have been proven to help those suffering from diet-related conditions improve their health and stay out of the hospital. Most also don’t appear to meet new voluntary accreditation standards crafted by medically-tailored meal providers.

“Homestyle Direct to me doesn’t look like medically tailored meals at all — it doesn’t even look like generally healthy meals,” said Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University.

Hundreds of patients are being asked to get tested for hepatitis B and C, as well as HIV, due to the potential exposure by an anesthesiologist.

Thousands of patients who were treated at two hospitals in Portland, Oregon, are being told to get bloods tests because of an "infection control breach" linked to an anesthesiologist that may have exposed them to HIV and hepatitis B and C.

About 2,400 people who were patients of two health care providers — Providence and Legacy Health — are potentially affected and have been advised to take tests "out of an abundance of caution."

Providence Willamette Falls Medical Center in Oregon City said in a statement that about 2,200 of its patients, and two patients at Providence Portland Medical Center, have been informed.

Cheap, counterfeit Botox given by people not trained to do facial injections, in places without a doctor on standby, became a dangerous combination that landed more than a dozen women in the hospital.

In at least one case, a woman became so ill that she had to be placed on a ventilator to help her breathe.

Seventeen women in nine states have experienced symptoms ranging from blurry vision to trouble swallowing and breathing after receiving what they thought were Botox injections to smooth fine lines and wrinkles. Thirteen were hospitalized, and several needed treatment in the intensive care unit.

As Zyn sales soar, experts are warning about the possible risks related to the addictive product.

…

Nicotine pouches like Zyn have soared in popularity in recent years. Zyn, a Swedish brand, was acquired by Philip Morris in 2022, and in the first three months of this year, more than 131 million cans were sold, an 80% percent increase from the same time last year. Last month, a shortage of Zyn sparked outcry on social media. Other products include Rogue, Velo and On!. Most are marketed as smoke-free, spit-free and hands-free alternatives to cigarettes and other tobacco products.

“Usually when you say that something is free of something, it makes it seem less harmful,” said Tory Spindle, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore. “Our concern is that, well, does that make them more appealing to someone that otherwise would have never tried any tobacco product?” 

While Spindle said nicotine pouches — which users tuck between their lip and gums and later discard — could serve as a better alternative for established tobacco users, “the challenge is, how do you make the products accessible to someone like that, while not inadvertently addicting a new wave of individuals who never would have tried nicotine?”

Pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) are key part of US's high drug costs, report finds.

Firms that serve as intermediaries to negotiate and control prescription drug access in the US "wield enormous power," largely with "extraordinarily opaque" business practices, and may be "inflating drug costs and squeezing Main Street pharmacies" for profit, according to a searing interim report released Tuesday by the Federal Trade Commission.

Amid a national focus on America's uniquely astronomical drug costs, the FTC is taking aim at firms that largely work deep in the bowels of the country's labyrinthine health care system, well hidden from public understanding and scrutiny: pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs).

PBMs were initially hired by various payors—employers, health insurance companies, government health plans, and others—to manage prescription drug benefits through various plans. But PBMs have evolved over the years to also negotiate rebates from drugmakers, set reimbursements for dispensing pharmacies, and develop drug formularies (the list of drugs that a health plan covers.) While those functions alone grant PBMs a large amount of power, consolidation and integration over recent years has concentrated that power in troubling ways, according to the FTC report.

Around 22 million people live in counties that are "cardiology deserts" and need to travel nearly 90 miles round trip to seek specialty heart care.

Millions of Americans likely to develop and die from heart disease live in cardiology deserts — areas of the country without a single heart specialist to care for them. 

New research published Monday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology finds that nearly half of all counties in the U.S. lack a practicing cardiologist. 

Most of those counties are rural, with residents who tend to be sicker in general with complex medical problems.

Research suggests impact of pollution begins before conception by disrupting the development of the egg

Air pollution exposure can significantly decrease the chance of a live birth after IVF treatment, according to research that deepens concern about the health impacts of toxic air on fertility.

Pollutant exposure has previously been linked to increased miscarriage rates and preterm births, and microscopic soot particles have been shown to travel through the bloodstream into the ovaries and the placenta. The latest work suggests that the impact of pollution begins before conception by disrupting the development of eggs.

“We observed that the odds of having a baby after a frozen embryo transfer were more than a third lower for women who were exposed to the highest levels of particulate matter air pollution prior to egg collection, compared with those exposed to the lowest levels,” said Dr Sebastian Leathersich, a fertility specialist and gynaecologist from Perth who is due to present the findings on Monday at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology annual meeting in Amsterdam.

The arrival on the market of many innovative treatments has been hampered by pharmaceutical companies’ business strategies

Darius is 15 years old and is a dazzling example of how medical research has advanced. Born with a rare and lethal genetic disease, early active cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy — CALD, the same condition that killed his older brother Danuk — the adolescent boy is today, healthy and happy in his hometown of Quintanar de la Orden, in the Spanish province of Toledo. His recovery has been thanks to a gene therapy called Skysona. A benevolent ­virus, a Trojan horse that was introduced into his body when the boy was five years old, it was able to replace the boy’s defective gene with a healthy one, thus saving his life.

But to the frustration of his doctors and other families, Darius’s treatment has not been available on the European market since 2021, due to a decision made by its pharmaceutical company Bluebird Bio that has left dozens of young people in the EU without the opportunity to follow Darius down the same path to survival. “It is difficult to comprehend,” says Carmen Sever, president of the European Lecodystrophies Association in Spain (ELA-Spain), which has helped patient associations to finance and develop the drug.