California Healthline: GOP’s Latest Campaign Punch On Health Care Relies On Classic Hook: Medicare
Democrats throughout the election season have been hammering Republicans over votes and lawsuits that would eliminate insurance protections for preexisting conditions for consumers. But now Republicans are working to change the health care conversation with a tried-and-true technique used by both parties over the years: telling seniors their Medicare coverage may be in danger. (Rovner, 10/30)

The Sacramento Bee: California Nurses Move 'Medicare-For-All' Fight Nationally
The union representing 100,000 nurses across California has shifted its “Medicare-for-all” campaign from California to the national stage, perhaps relieving political pressure on Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom to fulfill what the union sees as his top campaign promise: Delivering a single-payer health care system in the nation’s largest state. The California Nurses Association, which led the coalition behind the high-profile 2017 push for a single-payer system, has re-branded its campaign with the slogan “Fight to Win Medicare-for-All!” Its social media feeds reflect the new national scope of their efforts. (Hart, 10/27)

In other midterm elections news —

Los Angeles Times: More Than $100 Million Spent On Battle Over Dialysis Industry Profits In California 
A war between a healthcare union and the dialysis industry it wants to organize has morphed into one of the most expensive ballot measure campaigns in California history. Proposition 8, sponsored by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers, would shrink the profits of hundreds of dialysis clinics across California. (Luna, 10/29)

Bloomberg: Health-Care Companies Pour $46.7 Million Into Midterm Vote 
The health-care industry has given $46.7 million to candidates in the midterm elections this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, pouring money into a tightly fought battle between Democrats and Republicans over control of Congress. Of the money given by health-care political action committees -- the official political arms of companies and industry or professional associations -- 57 percent went to Republicans. (Dodge, 10/29)

The Washington Post: Fact Checker: Democrats Hype Estimates Of People With Preexisting Conditions
If Democrats have their way, the midterm elections will turn on the issue of preexisting conditions. As we have documented, some House Republicans have even sought to diminish the impact of their votes in favor of the House GOP plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act by falsely citing our fact checks. But Democrats, in pressing their advantage on the issue, have gone too far in claiming how many people potentially would have been affected if the GOP bill had been enacted into law. Some of their tweets and statements are even undercut by a report issued Oct. 24 by Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. (Kessler, 10/30)

The San Diego Union-Tribune: NIH Gives SDSU $20M To Help Boost The School's Work In The Health Sciences 
San Diego State University’s quest to become an elite public research school has received another boost from the National Institutes of Health, which is giving the campus $19.9 million to broadly study human health. The grant also will help the university and its partners to identify and address the health care needs of under-served populations — an endeavor that earned SDSU a $10 million NIH contract two years ago. The new grant is among the largest ever received by SDSU, which is looking to expand and improve its fundamental ability to do such things as collect and analyze data, store bio-specimens and conduct surveys. (Robbins, 10/29)

The California Health Report: Study: Racism Affects Even Young Kids' Mental And Behavioral Health
Young children who experience discrimination are at heightened risk for mental health and behavior problems, but less so if they have a strong sense of racial and ethnic identity, a new study suggests. Researchers at UC Riverside and Clark University, Mass., studied more than 170 children attending schools in Southern California’s Inland Empire. ... At age 7, the researchers explained the concept of discrimination in simple terms to the children, and asked if they’d ever felt discriminated against by peers, teachers or others because of their skin color, language, accent, culture or country of origin. More than half of the children reported such experiences. (Boyd-Barrett, 10/29)

Richmond Times-Dispatch: Wounded Warrior Project Expands Mental Health Care Services For Veterans
As suicide rates among veterans remain high, the Wounded Warrior Project has committed to expanding its mental health care services to reach about 5,000 additional veterans across the nation over the next five years. ... The network, which was launched in 2016, sponsors veterans through an intensive, two- to three-week program to help them cope with post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury at one of four academic medical centers: UCLA Health in California, Emory Healthcare in Georgia, Rush University Medical Center in Illinois and Massachusetts General Hospital. (Balch, 10/29)

The Salt Lake Tribune: To Fight High Drug Prices, Utah Will Pay For Public Employees To Go Fill Prescriptions In Mexico
Amid a flurry of national proposals to bring exorbitant U.S. drug prices in line with other countries’ charges, one Utah insurer has a different option for patients: Pay them to go to Mexico. PEHP, which covers 160,000 public employees and family members, is offering plane tickets to San Diego, transportation to Tijuana, and a $500 cash payout to patients who need certain expensive drugs for multiple sclerosis, cancer and autoimmune disorders. (Alberty, 10/29)

The Hill: Physicians Group Urges FTC To Monitor Insulin Pricing 
The American Medical Association is urging the Federal Trade Commission to take action against drug companies they say are contributing to high prices for insulin. In a letter to FTC Chairman Joseph Simons, the AMA said physicians are concerned that the rapid rise in the price of insulin for patients is unrelated to the actual costs of research, development, commercialization, or production. (Weixel, 10/29)

Stat: Heart Failure Study Paused Over Concerns About Disputed Cell Therapy Papers 
A government agency has paused a clinical trial testing an experimental stem cell therapy in heart failure patients, a move made public on Monday and sparked by recommendations to retract 31 journal articles from the lab of a controversial cardiac stem cell researcher. “Recent calls for the retraction of journal articles in related fields of cell therapy research have raised concerns about the scientific foundations of this trial,” the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute said in a statement posted Monday. (Cooney, 10/29)

The New York Times: He Promised To Restore Damaged Hearts. Harvard Says His Lab Fabricated Research.
For Dr. Piero Anversa, the fall from scientific grace has been long, and the landing hard. Researchers worldwide once hailed his research as revolutionary, promising the seemingly impossible: a way to grow new heart cells to replace those lost in heart attacks and heart failure, leading killers in the United States. But Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, his former employers, this month accused Dr. Anversa and his laboratory of extensive scientific malpractice. (Kolata, 10/29)

Stat: Conflicts Of Interest In Clinical Practice Guidelines An 'Intractable Problem'
Despite a parade of studies warning that treatment guidelines issued by professional medical societies fail to fully disclose potential financial conflicts, two new analyses report that the problem persists. In one analysis, researchers found that 57 percent of 91 authors who developed 18 different guidelines for several big-selling medicines had financial conflicts, and 25 percent of the authors did not disclose a conflict in the guidelines or supplemental materials. The median undisclosed payment was $522, while the average was $17,000. Moreover, none of the guidelines were fully compliant with disclosure requirements issued by the National Academy of Medicine. (Silverman, 10/29)

Bloomberg: Lucrative Drug Trials Prompt Regional Hospitals To Join Forces 
Small hospitals need money. Drug companies need patients for tests. Both sides say they’ve found a solution. Regional hospitals across the U.S. are banding together to make it easier for pharmaceutical companies to use their facilities for clinical trials, a strategy that could boost revenue and give drugmakers increased access to patients. (Hopkins, 10/29)

Bloomberg: Novartis Cuts 20% Of Drug-Research Projects After Review 
Novartis AG has dropped about a fifth of its research projects as the drugmaker narrows its focus on the most cutting-edge medicines. The pharmaceutical giant has reduced its drug programs to 340 from 430 after completing a review of its portfolio, Jay Bradner, president of the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, said in an interview Monday. Among the research projects it’s no longer pursuing are medicines for infectious diseases. (Paton, 10/30)

Stat: J&J Loses Patent Fight Over Key Cancer Drug, Teeing Up Generic Competition 
In a challenge to Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), a federal court ruled that a patent on a key drug — the big-selling Zytiga prostate cancer treatment — is invalid, triggering the likely arrival of lower-cost generic competition, possibly in a matter of days. The Friday decision had largely been expected by Wall Street analysts, who noted that a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office review board earlier this year had invalidated the same patent after determining it was not sufficiently inventive. The patent, which is due to expire in 2027, covered a method for administering the drug. (Silverman, 10/29)

KQED: How Hot Was It In California Homes Last Summer? Really Hot. Here's The Data
Heat kills people, even in the cool, coastal regions of California. Our investigation found that last year, two heat waves killed 14 people in the Bay Area, and sent hundreds more to the hospital. By our count, 79 percent of people who died started to experience heat illness at home. This year, a team of reporters and producers, with consulting from scientists, placed sensors inside dozens of homes around the state. (Peterson, 10/29)

Los Angeles Times: Cities In North Orange County Step Up With Housing For Homeless, With Santa Ana Leading The Way 
Following the high-profile removal of an illegal tent city near Angel Stadium, representatives of 13 cities in north Orange County on Monday say they are stepping up to offer a regional solution to temporary housing for the homeless — with Santa Ana leading the way. A shelter with 200 beds is nearly ready to open at an unnamed location in Santa Ana, according to officials. The staff at the nonprofit Mercy House — whose mission is to end homelessness locally — will be contracted to run the facility. The federal judge handling the civil rights lawsuits over the clearance of the homeless encampments called the plan “a role model for the county.” (Do, 10/29)

In other public health news from around the country: genealogical privacy, allergy labeling, doctors who treated the Pittsburgh shooting suspect, c-sections, gun-related injuries and more —

Capital Public Radio: Electronic Frontier Foundation Attorney On Protecting Privacy And Genetic Information
Investigators in the Golden State Killer case identified suspect Joseph James DeAngelo by tracing genetic information one of his relatives submitted to a genealogical website. Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation will discuss the implications of making this material available to investigators for privacy and civil liberties. (Ruyak, 10/29)

The Hill: FDA Takes Step Toward Requiring Allergy Labels For Sesame 
The Food and Drug Administration on Monday took a step to consider requiring sesame to be listed as an allergen on food labels. The request for information came in response to growing concerns about the prevalence of allergies to sesame seeds, which are currently not among the major allergens that are required to be disclosed on food ingredient lists. (Sullivan, 10/29)

The Washington Post: ‘I’m Dr. Cohen’: The Powerful Humanity Of The Jewish Hospital Staff That Treated Robert Bowers
The man accused in the brutal killings of 11 people in a synagogue in Pittsburgh was taken to the hospital after he was apprehended to be treated for the injuries he suffered in a gunfight with the police. In the emergency room when he arrived, he was shouting, “I want to kill all the Jews,” according to hospital’s president. If he only knew then about the identity of the team tasked with keeping him alive: at least three of the doctors and nurses who cared for him at the Allegheny General Hospital were Jewish, according to president Dr. Jeffrey K. Cohen. (Rosenberg, 10/30)

NPR: After C-Section, Does Spreading Mother's Microbes On Baby Improve Health?
The procedure, known as "vaginal seeding," is designed to help babies develop healthy microbiomes — the collection of friendly bacteria that inhabit every person's body. Some people call it a "bacterial baptism." ... The procedure was developed in response to the sharp rise in C-section births in recent years. That increase has been accompanied by more cases of asthma, allergies, eczema, obesity, and other diseases. (Stein, 10/29)

The Associated Press: Guns Send Over 8,000 US Kids To ER Each Year, Analysis Says
Gun injuries, including many from assaults, sent 75,000 U.S. children and teens to emergency rooms over nine years at a cost of almost $3 billion, a first-of-its-kind study found. Researchers called it the first nationally representative study on ER visits for gun injuries among U.S. kids. They found that more than one-third of the wounded children were hospitalized and 6 percent died. Injuries declined during most of the 2006-14 study, but there was an upswing in the final year. The researchers found that 11 of every 100,000 children and teens treated in U.S. emergency rooms have gun-related injuries. That amounts to about 8,300 kids each year. (Tanner, 10/29)

ProPublica: “We Will Keep On Fighting For Him.”
This is Wilson.* His mother, Aline, took the picture to mark a happy and hopeful moment following a traumatic period when Wilson participated in a University of Illinois at Chicago clinical trial that tested whether lithium was effective in treating children with bipolar disorder. ProPublica Illinois reported in April that the UIC psychiatrist who oversaw several federally funded studies, Dr. Mani Pavuluri, violated research rules, failed to alert parents of risks and falsified data to cover up misconduct, and that UIC didn’t properly oversee her work. (Cohen and Jaffe, 10/25)

The Washington Post: How Dogs Could Help Eradicate Malaria 
Steven Lindsay, a public health entomologist at Durham University in England, has been researching malaria control for decades. His preferred approach, he says, is to “sit on the boundaries,” drumming up ideas that others might not. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that his latest project was inspired by the baggage-claim area at Dulles International Airport. If the beagles there could use their noses to detect explosives or contraband in suitcases, he wondered, could they also be trained to sniff out an intractable disease that kills more than 400,000 people each year? (Brulliard, 10/29)

The New York Times: Why Is CBD Everywhere?
It’s hard to say the precise moment when CBD, the voguish cannabis derivative, went from being a fidget spinner alternative for stoners to a mainstream panacea. ... So the question now becomes: Is this the dawning of a new miracle elixir, or does all the hype mean we have already reached Peak CBD? Either way, it would be hard to script a more of-the-moment salve for a nation on edge. (Williams, 10/27)