The Washington Post: Trump Says Abortion Should Be Left To States, Declines To Endorse National Limit
Former president Donald Trump, who has wavered between highlighting and downplaying his role in curtailing abortion rights, suggested Monday that the politically volatile issue should be left to states, after months of mixed signals about his position. In a video posted on social media, Trump took credit for the overturning of Roe v. Wade but rebuffed pressure to campaign on a national limit. It is “now up to the states to do the right thing,” he said. “My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land. In this case, the law of the state,” Trump said in the video. (Knowles and LeVine, 4/8)

San Francisco Chronicle: Bay Area Startup Helps Women Nationwide Navigate Abortion Care In Post-Roe Landscape
A little more than 10 years ago, Rebecca Nall chose to have an abortion. Not long out of college and living in her native Texas, she found herself pregnant when she didn’t want to be. She reached out to her local Planned Parenthood, but the location didn’t offer the service. That set off a confusing, stressful, and seemingly endless series of Google searches and calls to try and find a nearby, affordable care provider. The experience was taxing even with the support of a partner and friends. (DiFeliciantonio, 4/7)

The Washington Post: Here’s What Not To Do To Safely Watch The Total Solar Eclipse
A total solar eclipse isn’t the kind of thing where you can just wing it. You have to wear eclipse glasses at all times when any part of the sun is visible. But there is an exception: Do not wear eclipse glasses during the brief period of “totality,” when the sun’s face is completely blocked by the moon, leaving only the glowing solar corona. (Achenbach, 4/5)

Orange County Register: Total Solar Eclipse: Here’s How Visible It Will Be In Southern California
The Earth, moon and sun will align for a total eclipse in some areas of the world Monday, April 8. Californians will see a partial eclipse of about 50%.If you miss the total eclipse this time, you’ll have to wait two decades for your next chance in North America. The path of the total eclipse will start in Texas and end in Maine. It will last approximately from 11:27 a.m. to 12:35 p.m. Pacific time. In the path of the moon’s shadow, the maximum duration of totality will be 4 minutes, 28 seconds. (Snibbe, 4/4)

KVPR: San Joaquin Valley Will Experience A Partial Solar Eclipse On Monday
On Monday, the total solar eclipse will cross North America. While the San Joaquin Valley is not in its direct path, a partial eclipse will still be visible. If you plan to see the phenomenon, just make sure you have the right eyewear before you look up. "You need to wear special eclipse glasses that block out the light from the sun. Even if one percent of the light from the sun is still reaching us on earth, it's too much, it will damage our eyes," UC Merced Astrophysics Professor Anna Nierenberg said. (Arakelian, 4/5)

Los Angeles Times: These Scientists Think Eclipse Could Help Unite Americans In Troubled Times
To hear Herodotus tell it, a total solar eclipse in 585 BC ended a five-year war between ancient kingdoms in present-day Turkey. Could another total eclipse on Monday bring an end to the partisan wars in America?The idea may sound far-fetched — until you talk with Paul Piff. The UC Irvine professor of psychology and social behavior has spent the better part of two decades researching what triggers us to set our personal needs aside and shift our focus to the greater good. (Kaplan, 4/7)

Modern Healthcare: How Chief AI Officers Are Helping Elevance Health, UC San Diego
As more healthcare organizations adopt artificial intelligence, there's a newcomer in some C-suites: the chief AI officer. Two-thirds of health systems plan to increase spending on AI by 25% or more in the next three years, according to a survey published in November by consulting firm Healthcare IT Leaders. Health insurers are also increasingly using AI to streamline operations, train employees and enhance customer service. (Perna, 4/5)

San Diego Union-Tribune: U.S. Secretary Of Health And Human Services Promotes Innovation In Latino-Focused San Diego Visit
Xavier Becerra, the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, stopped by a health care conference held at Snapdragon Stadium on Friday to promote a major government initiative aimed at spurring medical innovation, especially around equitable care for Latinos. (Sisson, 4/5)

Axios: Conflicts Found On Nuclear Medicine Safety Panel
Federal advisers on nuclear medicine safety had conflicts of interest when they evaluated whether accidental injections of radioactive drugs used in medical imaging should be reported to authorities, according to a watchdog report. Why it matters: The special inquiry found the Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn't have a policy requiring conflict-of-interest reviews and therefore lacks controls to ensure compliance with federal ethics guidelines. (Bettelheim, 4/8)

The New York Times: New England Journal Of Medicine Ignored Nazi Atrocities, Historians Find
The journal was “an outlier in its sporadic coverage of the rise of Nazi Germany,” wrote the article’s authors, Allan Brandt and Joelle Abi-Rached, both medical historians at Harvard. Often, the journal simply ignored the Nazis’ medical depredations, such as the horrific experiments conducted on twins at Auschwitz, which were based largely on Adolf Hitler’s spurious “racial science.” In contrast, two other leading science journals — Science and the Journal of the American Medical Association — covered the Nazis’ discriminatory policies throughout Hitler’s tenure, the historians noted. The New England journal did not publish an article “explicitly damning” the Nazis’ medical atrocities until 1949, four years after World War II ended. (Nazaryan, 4/6)

Bay Area News Group: San Jose Uses AI To Spot Homeless Camps. Will Other Cities Follow Suit?
Across the country, cities have begun experimenting with artificial intelligence to map potholes, reduce traffic and fight wildfires. In San Jose, officials are now harnessing the rapidly evolving technology with another goal in mind: detecting homeless encampments. (Varian, 4/7)

The (Santa Rosa) Press Democrat: What To Do About DEMA? Sonoma County Officials Grapple With Troubled Homeless Services Contractor’s Future 
On April 16, Sonoma County supervisors will take up the thorny topic they’ve been discussing since late February: What to do about DEMA? The homeless services vendor has been under scrutiny since a Press Democrat investigation last July raised questions about both the billing practices and culture of the for-profit company, which continues caring for some of the county’s most vulnerable people even though its last contract extension ran out on March 31. (Graham, 4/7)

Voice of OC: Is Orange County’s Homeless Shelter System Broken? 
Shelters in Orange County have eaten up nearly a third of the county’s almost $1 billion spent addressing the homelessness crisis over the past seven years, but records show they don’t help many people get off the streets. That’s starting to open questions from activists and homeless service providers on what the future of homeless response should look like in Orange County as the county’s own reports show the problem isn’t getting any better. (Biesiada, 4/8)

CBS News: California Woman's Fatal Poisoning From Hemorrhoid Cream Highlights Lead Risks 
Local officials issued a public health alert after a woman in Sacramento developed severe lead poisoning and died after using a hemorrhoid ointment from Vietnam called Cao Boi Tri Cay Thau Dau. The California Department of Public Health tested a sample of the ointment and found it contained what it described as "a highly dangerous amount of lead," or 4%, according to the county's alert. (Gibson, 4/4)

The Washington Post: FDA Urged To Rescind Approval Of AvertD Test For Opioid Addiction Risk 
A group of public health experts and scientists is calling on the Food and Drug Administration to rescind its controversial approval of a DNA test that promises to predict genetic risk of opioid addiction. In a letter sent to the agency on Thursday, 31 experts in genetics, addiction, psychiatry and medical-device regulation called the approval of AvertD a mistake that relied on faulty science and puts patients at risk. The group sent a separate letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services urging the agency, which oversees government health insurance programs, to deny coverage for the prescription-only test. (Ovalle, 4/5)

The New York Times: Teen Drug Use Habits Are Changing, For The Good. With Caveats. 
Dr. Nora Volkow, who leads the National Institutes of Drug Abuse, would like the public to know things are getting better. Mostly. (Richtel, 4/6)

NBC News: Gambling Addiction Hotlines Say Calls Are Up As Online Sports Betting Booms
In state after state, centers for problem gambling are noticing an alarming rise in calls to their helplines. The circumstances reported are also getting more severe, according to the directors of five problem gambling centers, a gambling researcher and an addiction counselor. People are filing for bankruptcy or losing homes or relationships. At the same time, callers are skewing younger, the experts said — often men in their 20s and 30s. (Mogg and Bendix, 4/5)

Fox News: CDC On Friday Issued A Health Alert To Inform Doctors About Bird Flu Case
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a health alert Friday to inform clinicians, state health departments and the public of a case of avian influenza — aka bird flu — in a person who had contact with dairy cows in Texas. A farmworker on a commercial dairy farm in Texas developed conjunctivitis last week, and subsequently tested positive for bird flu, the agency said.The positive bird flu diagnosis came after milk from dairy cows in Texas and Kansas tested positive for the disease. (Rumpf-Whitten, 4/5)

CIDRAP: Officials Warn Of H5N1 Avian Flu Reassortant Circulating In Parts Of Asia
Animal health officials in Vietnam and with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) today urged countries to be on alert for a new highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1 reassortant virus in chickens and mescovy ducks, which was found during active surveillance. In a statement, the FAO said the virus is a reassortant between the older H5N1 clade (2.3.2.1c) that is still circulating in parts of Asia and a newer H5N1 clade (2.3.4.4b) that began circulating globally in 2021. (Schnirring, 4/5)

CIDRAP: US Flu, COVID, RSV Activity Continues To Recede 
Respiratory virus activity in the United States is still elevated but continues to decline, with only 6 jurisdiction reporting high levels, down from 10 the previous week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today in its data updates. Flu markers declined for the third week in a row, following a prolonged rise after the winter holidays, according to the CDC's latest FluView report. Wastewater SARS-CoV-2 detections remain low and declining in most parts of the country, except for a very small rise in the Northeast. For respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), activity continues to decrease across the country, and 8 of 10 regions are now below the 3% test-positivity threshold, suggesting that the RSV season is ending in those areas. (Schnirring, 4/5)

CIDRAP: No Need To Avoid Exercise With Long-COVID Diagnosis, Researchers Say
Recommendations that people with long COVID, or post-COVID condition (PCC), should avoid vigorous exercise are probably too strict, according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open from researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. Many long-COVID patients are told to avoid activities that exacerbate symptoms such as fatigue, shortness of breath, and pain, and many report exercise intolerance, or a "flare" in symptoms following exercise. (Soucheray, 4/5)

Stat: About Half Of Cancer Drugs Given Accelerated Approval Don’t Show Improved Survival Or Quality Of Life
For decades, the Food and Drug Administration’s accelerated approval pathway has helped companies get drugs for serious unmet medical needs to patients — and the market — sooner. But about half of cancer drugs approved via this route fail to improve patient survival or quality of life in subsequent clinical trials after more than five years of follow-up, according to new findings presented Sunday at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting. The data come from an analysis of cancer drugs granted accelerated approval over the past decade. In some cases, failure to show clinical benefit didn’t stop the FDA from converting accelerated approvals into full approvals, and the authors note the agency’s conversion decisions have increasingly been based on less stringent evidence of a drug’s benefits. (Wosen, 4/7)

CNN: Study Links Accelerated Aging To Cancer Risk In Younger Adults
Researchers looking for clues about why some types of cancer are on the rise in younger adults say they’ve found an interesting lead: a connection to accelerated biological aging. Aging is the major risk for many types of cancer, meaning the older you get, the more likely you are to be diagnosed. And increasingly, experts recognize that age is more than just the number of candles on a birthday cake. It’s also the wear and tear on the body, caused by lifestyle, stress and genetics, which is sometimes referred to as a person’s biological age. (Goodman, 4/7)

Fox News: Ice Therapy Shown To Kill Breast Cancer Tumors In New Study: ‘Important Technique’
Ice could be the next frontier in breast cancer therapy, according to new research from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. In breast cancer patients, cold therapy was shown to be effective in freezing and destroying small, cancerous tumors in a study presented at the Society of Interventional Radiology Annual Scientific Meeting in Salt Lake City last week. Cryoablation, a minimally invasive technique, could provide a treatment alternative for patients who are not candidates for surgery, a press release stated. (Rudy, 4/5)

Bloomberg: Novo’s Wegovy Aids Heart Failure Patients With Diabetes In Study
Wegovy, the blockbuster weight-loss medication from Novo Nordisk A/S, eased heart failure symptoms for patients with diabetes in the latest large trial to support use of the drug to treat health conditions linked to obesity. Patients who took Wegovy reported less fatigue, less leg swelling, were less short of breath and were able to walk farther in six minutes than those who got a placebo, researchers reported on Saturday in the New England Journal of Medicine. (Kresge, 4/6)

Stat: Abiomed Heart Pump Reduces Heart Attack Deaths In Trial
A controversial heart pump from Abiomed reduced the number of deaths in severe heart attack patients, according to a highly anticipated randomized trial presented at the American College of Cardiology conference and published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Sunday. The trial, which took 10 years to enroll, followed 355 patients for 180 days in Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom who came into the hospital with a heart attack and dangerously low blood flow, known as cardiogenic shock. (Lawrence, 4/7)

Stat: Trial Challenges Practice Of Using Beta Blockers After Heart Attack
Beta blockers are a mainstay in cardiovascular treatment, frequently given to patients after heart attacks. But a new large trial turns that convention on its head, suggesting that the drugs may not in fact help many of these patients. The trial, which enrolled about 5,000 patients who specifically had preserved ejection fraction after a heart attack, found that long-term treatment with beta blockers did not significantly reduce the combined risk of death or new heart attack, according to results being presented here Sunday at the American College of Cardiology conference and published in the New England Journal of Medicine. (Chen, 4/7)