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Good morning. It’s a good time to be a soccer fan in the U.S. Still, I appreciate this take in Defector on the commercial hydration breaks.
$360,000
That’s about how much money the U.S. spent between January 2025 and March 2026 to store millions of dollars worth of contraceptives that were meant for international aid, according to a USAID Office of Inspector General advisory issued last week. (Monthly storage costs increased from more than $17,000 to $24,000 in that time.)
The birth control was originally meant to go to low-income countries in Africa but was left in Belgium after the Trump administration made massive cuts to USAID last year. Out of $9.7 million in family planning supplies, only about $1.7 million remain usable, as they’ve been stored in climate-controlled facilities. But expiration dates starting in April 2028 loom. Meanwhile, throughout Africa, there’s a crisis in family medicine planning, as sources told CNN this spring.
Pandora’s box of Medicare-funded weight loss
Starting next month, weight loss GLP-1 medications will be available to adults 65 and older in Medicare for the first time, thanks to a government program that’s supposed to be temporary. But as STAT’s John Wilkerson reports, calling something temporary is easier than actually ending the assistance.
Here’s the problem: Medicare leaders wanted to push private Medicare insurers to voluntarily cover the drugs in a three-year program that would have started following a short transitional period. But insurers didn’t take the bait, so the government is instead extending the transitional coverage program until the end of next year. Conveniently for insurers, taxpayers foot the bill on the transitional program. Read more from John on what this means for seniors and for taxpayers moving forward.
Data on Utah’s lower drunk driving limit
In 2018, Utah became the first U.S. state to lower the legal blood alcohol concentration limit for driving from 0.08 to 0.05 g/dL. A new study, published today in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that the number of deaths related to drunk driving decreased significantly in Utah after the law as compared to the surrounding states. Drunk driving deaths decreased across the board from 2018 to 2023, but interestingly, they went down most among crashes in which the driver’s BAC was between .01 and .05.
“These results indicate that Utah’s 0.05 BAC law had a strong deterrent effect on alcohol-related fatal crashes,” the authors concluded. The results are also consistent with progress seen abroad in countries like Australia and France, which have also adopted lower limits. More than a half-dozen U.S. states including Washington, New York, and Michigan are considering similar legislation this year.
Conflict-of-interest questions after a decade of HCA
Within the International Human Cell Atlas Consortium, Alexandra-Chloé Villani is known as a pioneer in using single-cell technologies to understand the immune system and how it responds to certain drugs. She’s an organizer for a major meeting that the group will hold this week in Boston, and she’s widely expected to be one of the people taking over a leadership role at the end of the year. What’s less known is that her husband is a senior executive at 10x Genomics, a company that makes critical technology for the consortium’s work and serves as the meeting’s top corporate sponsor.
In this rapidly moving field of biology, it’s not unusual for close ties between academia and industry to exist. Still, STAT’s Megan Molteni interviewed scientists involved with the HCA who said they were unaware of the relationship, and that it’s something that should be disclosed to the community. Read more on the ties that underlie the complicated, expensive work HCA scientists contribute to.
How supplement use changed over decades
The prevalence of supplement use among American adults has increased markedly since the turn of the millennium: In 1999, 51% of adults took supplements, compared to 60% in 2023, according to a new study in JAMA Network Open.
Researchers analyzed annual data from a nationally representative CDC health survey that included participant interviews on supplement use. They found that the use of these products really took off after 2009-10, particularly among older adults. Immune and anti-inflammatory products such as zinc, elderberry, and ashwagandha saw usage increases long term and over the Covid pandemic. Vitamin use increased, but multivitamin-multimineral use actually decreased, which the researchers propose is connected to a growing preference for personalized medicine.
How an Alzheimer’s expert missed it in her own father
The biology of Alzheimer’s disease begins 15 to 20 years before a family starts noticing something is off. Neurologist Elizabeth Bevins knows this, but still, she missed the quiet, early signs of disease in her father. “Not because I lacked training,” she writes in a new First Opinion essay. “But because I was trained to wait for unmistakable decline before acting.”
That, she argues, is the wrong lesson. Bevins sees the need for fundamental shift in the way brain health is treated: more early risk identification, surveillance over time, and intervention before irreversible damage. Read more on the case for acting earlier, as well as which risks might accompany such a strategy.
What we’re reading
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The kratom civil war is heating up, and MAHA has picked a side, Wired
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High inflation is forcing older women on fixed incomes to make hard choices, The 19th
- FDA approves Colorado’s plan to import cheaper drugs from Canada, STAT
- They’re uninsured after Obamacare became too costly. And they’re far from alone, KFF Health News
- Covid vaccination cut risk of adverse heart events, large study finds, STAT