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Vice President Kamala Harris Tuesday announced a plan to reduce the country’s alarmingly high maternal mortality rate by improving pregnancy and postpartum care nationwide. The strategy includes calling for states to extend postpartum coverage under Medicaid from 2 to 12 months and designating “birthing-friendly” hospitals. “Maternal mortality and morbidity is a serious crisis and one that endangers both public health and economic growth,” Harris said at a White House event. (Butler, 12/7)

After more than 30 years of evaluating the best health systems in America, U.S. News & World Report hopes to better inform expecting families with its first-ever edition of the “Best Hospitals for Maternity" report. Out of the 2,700 hospitals nationwide that offer maternity services, U.S. News said 237 made the list. But while health experts appreciate the focus on maternity care, some say the report provides an incomplete picture. The publication evaluated facilities based on five different factors: scheduled early deliveries, C-section rates in low-risk people, newborn complications, rate of exclusive breast milk feeding and option for vaginal births after cesarean. (Rodriguez, 12/7)

Eight years ago, a team of researchers launched a project to carefully repeat early but influential lab experiments in cancer research. They recreated 50 experiments, the type of preliminary research with mice and test tubes that sets the stage for new cancer drugs. The results reported Tuesday: About half the scientific claims didn’t hold up. “The truth is we fool ourselves. Most of what we claim is novel or significant is no such thing,” said Dr. Vinay Prasad, a cancer doctor and researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the project. (Johnson, 12/7)

Replication is something of a litmus test for scientific truth, and cancer biologists at the Center for Open Science wanted to see just how many of cancer’s most influential experiments stood up to it. So, for nearly a decade, they worked their way, step-by-step, through 50 experiments from 23 studies toward an answer — but like cancer research writ large, what they found is complicated. (Chen, 12/7)

The 5-month-old son of celebrity Nick Cannon died recently of a brain tumor, a rare but a serious condition among infants in the U.S., according to specialists in the field. Only about 1,200 to 1,500 children up to 4 years old are diagnosed with brain tumors every year, said Dr. Susan Chi, the deputy director of pediatric neuro-oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Boston Children’s Hospital. “Brain tumors in children are very rare. And certainly less frequent than what we see in the adult population,” Chi said. (Planas, 12/7)

Since 2007, about one-third of mumps cases reported in the United States were in children and teenagers, according to the report published last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of those approximately 9,000 cases, up to 94% of patients were vaccinated against the mumps, which can cause fever, headache, painful swollen glands and sometimes hearing loss in children. Although this may alarm some parents, health experts say they aren’t surprised. “People take from that headline that the vaccine doesn’t work,” said Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious diseases expert at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. But the vaccine has "virtually eliminated what was at one time the most common cause of deafness” in children. (Rodriguez, 12/8)

Public health officials are warning that the U.S. may be on the verge of a dangerous double whammy: COVID and flu, spreading simultaneously. The Delta variant is still circulating across the U.S., and the Omicron variant isn't far behind. On top of that, experts see potential warning signs of a bad flu season, which could leave millions of Americans vulnerable and strain health care resources. (Reed, 12/8)

The pandemic, natural disasters and response to other tragedies spurred giving in 2021, according to GoFundMe's annual report. The crowdfunding platform says one donation is made every second to help people across the globe. One in three fundraisers is started for someone else. Though the annual report did not specify numbers for every fundraiser, it highlighted some of 2021's "most notable" campaigns where people turned "hard to watch headlines into meaningful help." The company would not share which campaigns raised the most money. (Chen, 12/7)

It was a tally that shocked the experts: 38,680 deaths on U.S. roadways last year, the most since 2007 even though pandemic precautions had dramatically reduced driving. “This was completely unprecedented,” said Ken Kolosh, a researcher at the nonprofit National Safety Council. “We didn’t know what was happening.” One possibility was that stressed-out Americans were releasing their anxieties on the wide-open roads. He guessed that fatal accidents would decline in 2021 when traffic returned. He was wrong. The latest evidence suggests that after decades of safety gains, the pandemic has made U.S. drivers more reckless — more likely to speed, drink or use drugs and leave their seatbelts unbuckled. (Baumgaertner and Mitchell, 12/8)

KHN: From ‘Physician Assistant’ To Medicare, Readers And Tweeters Mince No Words 

KHN gives readers a chance to comment on a recent batch of stories. (12/8)