Doubling the number of Medicaid enrollees receiving hepatitis C treatments would avoid about $7 billion in health care costs over a decade, according to a new Congressional Budget Office report on the burden the liver disease places on medical care and safety net programs.
Why it matters: About 70,000 people are newly infected with hepatitis C each year in the U.S., and complications in untreated patients can be 10 times as costly as administering antivirals in earlier stages of the disease.
Very few Medicare enrollees who survive drug overdoses receive the gold standard for addiction treatment afterward, a new federal study shows.
Why it matters: The health care system can do much more to connect high-risk seniors with opioid use disorder treatments and prevention measures, the findings suggest.
What they found: Just 4.1%of nearly 137,000 traditional Medicare enrollees who had a nonfatal drug overdose in 2020 received highly effective medications for opioid use disorder like methadone and buprenorphinewithin 12 months, according to the new study in JAMA Internal Medicine.
About 6% filled a prescription for overdose reversal drug naloxone, and 18% received psychotherapy or counseling within a year of overdosing.
17.4% hadanother nonfatal overdose in the year after their initial overdose, and 1% died from an overdose.
Those who were prescribed naloxone, medication-assisted treatment or behavioral health services had lower risk of dying from another overdose, the study found.
"There's a lot more people who could benefit from treatment that don't appear to be receiving it," Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told Axios.
Between the lines: The research looks at Medicare claims from the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many seniors delayed or skipped health appointments.
To improve access to medication-assisted opioid treatment during the pandemic, the federal government loosened regulations around care options. The Biden administration has since made permanent some of those policies.
What's next: Prescribing naloxone in the emergency room following an overdose and quickly connecting people to community-based care can help bring down drug overdose rates in the U.S., the study noted.
"Not everyone who has a nonfatal overdose needs medication for opioid use disorder," Compton said. "But they do need help to make sure that they find ways to not engage in that very high risk behavior."
A growing number of high-profile public health experts are raising alarms over what they say are lackluster efforts to track and contain the spread of bird flu across U.S. dairy farms.
Why it matters: If this is a test of whether the U.S. is better prepared to respond to a potential pandemic threat after COVID-19, we're not getting high marks.
Democratic leaders are deploying a series of "show votes" to put Republicans in the hot seat and draw attention to their divisions on hot-button issues, including the blocked vote on IVF last week.
The big picture: Democrats are focusing their attention on birth control, IVF and Supreme Court ethics — all of which are vulnerabilities for the GOP ahead of the November elections.
A small but detectable amount of H5N1 bird flu survived a standard pasteurization method on milk infected with high concentrations of the virus, National Institutes of Health scientists wrote Friday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Why it matters: While evidence continues to indicate that the commercial milk supply is safe, the more virus there is in milk, the longer it takes to kill all of it, public health officials warn.
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on Congress Monday to require social media platforms to display warning labels alerting users of the potential harms the platforms pose to teens' mental health.
Why it matters: Murthy's call for congressional action comes amid rising awareness of the dangers of social media for young people, as platforms try to negate some of the harms while facing lawsuits for their roles in the youth mental health crisis.
Congressional Republicans are calling for a reorganization of the National Institutes of Health that would strip its authority over "gain of function" research and freeze the experiments until new reforms are established.
Why it matters: The draft plan feeds a narrative dating from the pandemic that portrays the government's health agencies as having lost the public's trust and could offer a blueprint for a GOP administration and Congress.
It's Pride month, a good time to share this reminder: It's natural to be queer in the animal world.
Why it matters: Looking at animals strictly through a heteronormative lens has long limited scientific understanding and contributed to the othering of members of the LGBTQ+ community, per science experts.
