Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Despite Trump's Apparent Olive Branch, HIV Advocates Remain Frustrated By Administration
The White House has issued an earnest聽statement attributed to President Trump about HIV/AIDS in America. It is聽technically accurate, apolitical and strikes just the right notes in terms of being somber and optimistic at the same time. There's nothing exciting about the content of the four-paragraph statement. It simply reminds people that today is National HIV Testing Day, reviews some statistics about聽the epidemic and tells people why it's important to get tested. (Cha, 6/27)
{Every] year, some 300,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with Lyme disease, according to the CDC, and that number is on the rise. Some people wait months or years to get a correct Lyme diagnosis. And their cases highlight a problem: tests for Lyme in the first month of infection are frequently wrong. When diagnosed and treated early the infection is a simple one to get rid of, but left untreated it can cause a myriad of lingering symptoms, from severe arthritis to short-term memory problems. Now, a number of research groups are working to improve Lyme tests to catch infections in the early stages. One avenue being studied by the CDC aims to create a Lyme 鈥渟ignature鈥 of small molecules in the blood 鈥 an approach that, in early testing, catches a dramatically higher share of early infections. (Caruso, 6/28)
There's a big push in the U.S. from pediatricians to have mothers of newborns breast-feed exclusively for at least six months. And many new moms want to. But only about 60 percent who start off breast-feeding keep it up for six months or more, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Doucleff, 6/27)
The Villages Regional Hospital did not sweat its decision to add hyperbaric oxygen therapy in 2013. Hyperbaric treatment, increasingly given to diabetics 鈥 many of them elderly with persistent wounds聽鈥 involves breathing pure oxygen inside a pressurized air chamber typically for two hours each weekday, often for more than a month. Twenty outpatient sessions can bring a hospital $9,000 in revenue. (Galewitz, 6/28)
