"At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China's growing influence in the Philippines..." reports Reuters.

"It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found."

Reuters interviewed "more than two dozen current and former U.S officials, military contractors, social media analysts and academic researchers," and also reviewed posts on social media, technical data and documents about "a set of fake social media accounts used by the U.S. military" — some active for more than five years. Friday they reported the results of their investigation: Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military's propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines — China's Sinovac inoculation. Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus — Tagalog for China is the virus.

"COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don't trust China!" one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: "From China — PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real." After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

The U.S. military's anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China's vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China's shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law...

A senior Defense Department official acknowledged the U.S. military engaged in secret propaganda to disparage China's vaccine in the developing world, but the official declined to provide details. A Pentagon spokeswoman... also noted that China had started a "disinformation campaign to falsely blame the United States for the spread of COVID-19."
A senior U.S. military officer directly involved in the campaign told Reuters that "We didn't do a good job sharing vaccines with partners. So what was left to us was to throw shade on China's."

At least six senior State Department officials for the region objected, according to the article. But in 2019 U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper signed "a secret order" that "elevated the Pentagon's competition with China and Russia to the priority of active combat, enabling commanders to sidestep the StateDepartment when conducting psyops against those adversaries."

[A senior defense official] said the Pentagon has rescinded parts of Esper's 2019 order that allowed military commanders to bypass the approval of U.S. ambassadors when waging psychological operations. The rules now mandate that military commanders work closely with U.S. diplomats in the country where they seek to have an impact. The policy also restricts psychological operations aimed at "broad population messaging," such as those used to promote vaccine hesitancy during COVID...

Nevertheless, the Pentagon's clandestine propaganda efforts are set to continue. In an unclassified strategy document last year, top Pentagon generals wrote that the U.S. military could undermine adversaries such as China and Russia using "disinformation spread across social media, false narratives disguised as news, and similar subversive activities [to] weaken societal trust by undermining the foundations of government."

And in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign — General Dynamics IT — won a $493 million contract. Its mission: to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military.

Bloomberg reports: A disease caused by a rare "flesh-eating bacteria" that can kill people within 48 hours is spreading in Japan after the country relaxed Covid-era restrictions. Cases of streptococcal toxic shock syndrome (STSS) reached 977 this year by June 2, higher than the record 941 cases reported for all of last year, according to the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, which has been tracking incidences of the disease since 1999.

Group A Streptococcus (GAS) typically causes swelling and sore throat in children known as "strep throat," but some types of the bacteria can lead to symptoms developing rapidly, including limb pain and swelling, fever, low blood pressure, that can be followed by necrosis, breathing problems, organ failure and death. People over 50 are more prone to the disease. "Most of the deaths happen within 48 hours," said Ken Kikuchi, a professor in infectious diseases at Tokyo Women's Medical University. "As soon as a patient notices swelling in foot in the morning, it can expand to the knee by noon, and they can die within 48 hours...."

At the current rate of infections, the number of cases in Japan could reach 2,500 this year, with a "terrifying" mortality rate of 30%, Kikuchi said.

The $22 million paid by Change Healthcare's parent company to unlock its systems "may have emboldened bad actors to further target the vulnerable industry," writes Axios: There were 44 attacks against the health care sector in April, the most that [cybersecurity firm] Recorded Future has seen in the four years it's been collecting data. It was also the second-largest month-over-month jump, after 30 ransomware attacks were recorded in March. There were 32 attacks in February and May.
But an analysis by the security-focused magazine CSO says the "disastrous" incident also "starkly illustrated the fragility of the healthcare sector, prompting calls for regulatory action." In response to the attack, US politicians have called for mandated baseline cybersecurity standards in the health sector, as well as better information sharing. They have also raised concerns that industry consolidation is increasing cyber risk.
So what went wrong? The attackers used a set of stolen credentials to remotely access the company's systems. But the article also notes Change Healthcare's systems "suffered from a lack of segmentation, which enables easy lateral movement of the attack" — and that the company's acquisition may have played a role: Mergers and acquisitions create new cyber threats because they involve the integration of systems, data, and processes from different organizations, each with its own security protocols and potential vulnerabilities. "During this transition, cybercriminals can exploit discrepancies in security measures, gaps in IT governance, and the increased complexity of managing merged IT environments," Aron Brand, CTO of CTERA told CSOonline. "Additionally, the heightened sharing of sensitive information between parties provides more opportunities for data breaches."
And "In the end, paying the ransom failed to protect UHG from secondary attempts at extortion." In April, cybercriminals from the RansomHub group threatened to leak portions of 6TB of sensitive data stolen from the breach of Change Healthcare, and obtained through Nichy, according to an analysis by security vendor Forescout. An estimated one in three Americans had their sensitive data exposed as a result of the attack. Such secondary scams are becoming increasingly commonplace and healthcare providers are particularly at risk, according to compliance experts... The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is investigating whether a breach of protected health information occurred in assessing whether either UHG or Change Healthcare violated strict healthcare sector privacy regulations.
Thanks to Slashdot reader snydeq for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A committee of independent advisers to the Food and Drug Administration voted unanimously on Monday that the benefits outweigh the risks of the newest experimental drug for Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's afflicts more than six million Americans. It has no cure, and there is no treatment or lifestyle modification that can restore memory loss or reverse cognitive decline. The drug, made by Eli Lilly, is donanemab. It modestly slowed cognitive decline in patients in the early stages of the disease but also had significant safety risks, including swelling and bleeding in the brain. The committee concluded, though, that the consequences of Alzheimer's are so dire that even a modest benefit can be worthwhile.

The F.D.A. usually follows the advice of the agency's advisory committees but not always. The drug is based on a long-held hypothesis that Alzheimer's disease begins when rough hard balls of amyloid, a protein, pile up in patients' brains, followed by a cascade of reactions leading to the death of neurons. The idea is to treat Alzheimer's by attacking amyloid, clearing it from the brain. Two similar amyloid-fighting drugs were approved recently: Leqembi, made by Eisai and Biogen, was approved last year. That drug's risks and modest benefits are similar to those of donanemab. Aduhelm, made by Biogen, is the other drug and was approved in 2021 but was discontinued because there was insufficient evidence that it could benefit patients. Donanemab was expected to be approved earlier this year, but in March, the F.D.A. decided that, instead, it would require donanemabto undergo the scrutiny of an independent advisory committee, a surprise to Eli Lilly.

The vote, said Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, chief scientific officer at Lilly, confirmed his 25-year quest to find a way to intervene in the Alzheimer's disease. Now, he said, the company is starting a study that, it hopes, will stop the disease before symptoms even begin. At issue before the committee on Monday were some unusual aspects of donanemab's clinical trials, especially that study participants stopped taking the drug as soon as their amyloid was cleared. Some experts questioned whether stopping was the best strategy and whether clinical practice should include halting the treatment after amyloid clearance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: Authors of a landmark Alzheimer's disease research paper published in Nature in 2006 have agreed to retract the study in response to allegations of image manipulation. University of Minnesota (UMN) Twin Cities neuroscientist Karen Ashe, the paper's senior author, acknowledged in a post on the journal discussion site PubPeer that the paper contains doctored images. The study has been cited nearly 2500 times, and would be the most cited paper ever to be retracted, according to Retraction Watch data. "Although I had no knowledge of any image manipulations in the published paper until it was brought to my attention two years ago," Ashe wrote on PubPeer, "it is clear that several of the figures in Lesne et al. (2006) have been manipulated ... for which I as the senior and corresponding author take ultimate responsibility." After initially arguing the paper's problems could be addressed with a correction, Ashe said in another post last week that all of the authors had agreed to a retraction -- with the exception of its first author, UMN neuro-scientist Sylvain Lesne, a protege of Ashe's who was the focus of a 2022 investigation by Science. "It's unfortunate that it has taken 2 years to make the decision to retract," says Donna Wilcock, an Indiana University neuroscientist and editor of the journal Alzheimer's & Dementia. "The evidence of manipulation was overwhelming."

The 2006 paper suggested an amyloid beta (AB) protein called AB*56 could cause Alzheimer's. AB proteins have long been linked to the disease. The authors reported that AB*56 was present in mice genetically engineered to develop an Alzheimer's-like condition, and that it built up in step with their cognitive decline. The team also reported memory deficits in rats injected with AB*56. For years researchers had tried to improve Alzheimer's outcomes by stripping amyloid proteins from the brain, but the experimental drugs all failed. AB*56 seemed to offer a more specific and promising therapeutic target, and many embraced the finding. Funding for related work rose sharply. But the Science investigation revealed evidence that the Nature paper and numerous others co-authored by Lesne, some listing Ashe as senior author, appeared to use manipulated data. After the story was published, leading scientists who had cited the paper to support their own experiments questioned whether AB*56 could be reliably detected and purified as described by Lesne and Ashe -- or even existed. Some said the problems in that paper and others supported fresh doubts about the dominant hypothesis that amyloid drives Alzheimer's. Others maintained that the hypothesis remains viable. That debate has continued amid the approval of the antiamyloid drug Leqembi, which modestly slows cognitive decline but carries risks of serious or even fatal brain swelling or bleeding.

Due to complications with a mechanical heart pump, surgeons in New York removed a pig kidney from Lisa Pisano less than two months after transplanting it. The genetically engineered pig kidney did not show signs of rejection but suffered from inadequate blood flow. Wired reports: Pisano was facing heart and kidney failure and required routine dialysis. She wasn't eligible to receive a traditional heart and kidney transplant from a human donor because of several chronic medical conditions that reduced the likelihood of a good outcome. Pisano first received a heart pump at NYU Langone Health on April 4, followed by the pig kidney transplant on April 12. The heart pump, a device called a left ventricular assist device or LVAD, is used in patients who are either awaiting heart transplantation or otherwise aren't a candidate for a heart transplant.

In a statement provided to WIRED, Pisano's medical team explained that they electively removed the pig kidney on May 29-47 days after transplant -- after several episodes of the heart pump not being able to pass enough blood through the transplanted kidney. Steady blood flow is important so that the kidney can produce urine and filter waste. Without it, Pisano's kidney function began to decline. "On balance, the kidney was no longer contributing enough to justify continuing the immunosuppression regimen," said Robert Montgomery, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute, in the statement. Like traditional transplant patients, Pisano needed to take immunosuppressive drugs to prevent her immune system from rejecting the donor organ.

The kidney came from a pig genetically engineered by Virginia biotech company Revivicor to lack a gene responsible for the production of a sugar known as alpha-gal. In previous studies at NYU Langone, researchers found that removing this sugar prevented immediate rejection of the organ when transplanted into brain-dead patients. During Pisano's surgery, the donor pig's thymus gland, which is responsible for "educating" the immune system, was also transplanted to reduce the likelihood of rejection. A recent biopsy did not show signs of rejection, but Pisano's kidney was injured due to a lack of blood flow, according to the statement. The team plans to study the explanted pig kidney to learn more.

Gizmodo reports there's been progress on a male birth-control gel "being developed with the help of several organizations, including the U.S. government's National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, part of the larger NIH." It's now being tested in a larger-scale Phase IIB trial, which involves around 400 couples. [Five milliliters of gel — about a teaspon — is applied to each shoulder blade once a day, reports NBC News.] That trial is still ongoing, but researchers have already begun to pore through some of the available data, which has provided encouraging results. In the summer of 2022, for instance, Diana Blithe, chief of the NICHD's Contraceptive Development Program, reported that the NES/T gel's efficacy rate so far appeared to be on par or even better than contraceptive hormonal options for women...

The findings are still preliminary, and it will take more time for the full Phase II data to be collected and analyzed. But Blithe and her team have been encouraged by everything they've seen to date. In the team's early assessments, the gel appears to be both effective and safe, with minimal side effects for men taking it... Blithe and her colleagues are set to meet with the FDA next year about the steps needed to begin a larger Phase III trial and are still seeking a commercial partner to help bring the NES/T gel to the market.
Initial findings also showed that the contraceptive worked faster than expected, Blithe said, according to NBC News. They add that at least three other companies are also working on male birth control: Also at the Boston conference on Sunday, YourChoice Therapeutics said a very small trial in the U.K. — just 16 men — showed that its nonhormonal pill, YCT-529, was safe and free of side effects. The San Francisco company's nonhormonal pill works by blocking the vitamin A receptor important for male fertility.YourChoice is planning a larger trial, according to CEO Akash Bakshi.

Will appetite-suppressing drugs hurt the sugar industry? Executives from Walmart warned that Ozempic and Zepbound "are impacting food sales," reports Bloomberg, "and multiple analyst surveys have showed that less-hungry customers are spending fewer dollars at grocery stores and restaurants." The drugs, which cut cravings, will result in a decline in calorie consumption in the US of 1.5% to 2.5% by 2035, with a drop of as much as 5% in the consumption of sweets such as baked goods, confectionery and soda, Morgan Stanley analysts including Pamela Kaufman said in a report last month. Morgan Stanley forecast about a 10th of the US population will be on the so-called GLP-1 medications — originally designed to treat diabetes but being used by many as a powerful weight-loss tool — by 2035... Even with tight supplies and sky-high prices limiting uptake of the medications, sales of GLP-1 drugs for both obesity and diabetes already exceeded $19 billion in 2023. The global obesity market alone could top $100 billion by the end of the decade, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimates, while Bloomberg Intelligence forecasts $80 billion of sales.

More than 60% of US consumers taking the drugs said they had cut back on sweet treats like candy, ice cream and baked goods, and many said they had either significantly — or entirely — stopped eating those products, according to Morgan Stanley.

"Chinese scientists develop cure for diabetes," reads the headline from the world's second-most widely read English-language newspaper. ("Insulin patient becomes medicine-free in just 3 months.")

The researchers' results were published earlier in May in Cell Discovery, and are now getting some serious scrutiny from the press. The Economic Times cites a University of British Columbia professor's assessment that the study "represents an important advance in the field of cell therapy for diabetes," in an article calling it a "breakthrough" that "marks a significant advancement in cell therapy for diabetes." Chinese scientists have successfully cured a patient's diabetes using a groundbreaking cell therapy... According to a South China Morning Post report, the patient underwent the cell transplant in July 2021. Remarkably, within eleven weeks, he no longer required external insulin. Over the next year, he gradually reduced and ultimately stopped taking oral medication for blood sugar control. "Follow-up examinations showed that the patient's pancreatic islet function was effectively restored," said Yin, one of the lead researchers. The patient has now been insulin-free for 33 months... The new therapy involves programming the patient's peripheral blood mononuclear cells, transforming them into "seed cells" to recreate pancreatic islet tissue in an artificial environment.
Their article calls it "a significant medical milestone" — noting that 140 million people in China have diabetes (according to figures from the International Diabetes Federation).

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

Long before people develop dementia, they often begin falling behind on mortgage payments, credit card bills and other financial obligations, new research shows. The New York Times: A team of economists and medical experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University combined Medicare records with data from Equifax, the credit bureau, to study how people's borrowing behavior changed [PDF] in the years before and after a diagnosis of Alzheimer's or a similar disorder. What they found was striking: Credit scores among people who later develop dementia begin falling sharply long before their disease is formally identified. A year before diagnosis, these people were 17.2 percent more likely to be delinquent on their mortgage payments than before the onset of the disease, and 34.3 percent more likely to be delinquent on their credit card bills. The issues start even earlier: The study finds evidence of people falling behind on their debts five years before diagnosis.

"The results are striking in both their clarity and their consistency," said Carole Roan Gresenz, a Georgetown University economist who was one of the study's authors. Credit scores and delinquencies, she said, "consistently worsen over time as diagnosis approaches, and so it literally mirrors the changes in cognitive decline that we're observing." The research adds to a growing body of work documenting what many Alzheimer's patients and their families already know: Decision-making, including on financial matters, can begin to deteriorate long before a diagnosis is made or even suspected. People who are starting to experience cognitive decline may miss payments, make impulsive purchases or put money into risky investments they would not have considered before the disease.

Private-equity investors have poured billions into healthcare but often game the system, hurting both doctors and patients. From a report: Consolidation is as American as apple pie. When a business gets bigger, it forces mom-and-pop players out of the market, but it can boost profits and bring down costs, too. Think about the pros and cons of Walmart and "Every Day Low Prices." In a complex, multitrillion-dollar system like America's healthcare market, though, that principle has turned into a harmful arms race that has helped drive prices increasingly higher without improving care. Years of dealmaking has led to sprawling hospital systems, vertically integrated health insurance companies, and highly concentrated private equity-owned practices resulting in diminished competition and even the closure of vital health facilities. As this three-part Heard on the Street series will show, the rich rewards and lax oversight ultimately create pain for both patients and the doctors who treat them. Belatedly, state and federal regulators and lawmakers are zeroing in on consolidation, creating uncertainty for the investors who have long profited from the healthcare merger boom.

Consider the impact of massive private-equity investment in medical practices. When a patient with employer-based insurance goes under for surgery, the anesthesiologist's fee is supposed to be determined by market forces. But what happens if one firm quietly buys out several anesthesiologists in the same city and then hikes the price of the procedure? Such a scheme was allegedly implemented by the private-equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe and the company it created in 2012, U.S. Anesthesia Partners, according to a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit filed last year. It started by buying the largest practice in Houston and then making three further acquisitions, eventually expanding into other cities throughout the state of Texas. In each location, the lawsuit alleges, USAP pursued an aggressive strategy of eliminating competitors by either acquiring them or conspiring with them to weaken competition. As one insurance executive put it in the FTC lawsuit, USAP and Welsh Carson used acquisitions to "take the highest rate of all ... and then peanut butter spread that across the entire state of Texas." In May, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt dismissed the FTC's unusual step of charging the private-equity investor, Welsh Carson, but allowed the case against USAP to proceed.

"About 1 in 9 children in the U.S., between the ages of 3 and 17, have been diagnosed with ADHD," reports NPR: That's according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that calls attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder an "expanding public health concern."

Researchers found that in 2022, 7.1 million kids and adolescents in the U.S. had received an ADHD diagnosis — a million more children than in 2016. That jump in diagnoses was not surprising, given that the data was collected during the pandemic, says Melissa Danielson, a statistician with the CDC's National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities and the study's lead author. She notes that other studies have found that many children experienced heightened stress, depression and anxiety during the pandemic. "A lot of those diagnoses... might have been the result of a child being assessed for a different diagnosis, something like anxiety or depression, and their clinician identifying that the child also had ADHD," Danielson says. The increase in diagnoses also comes amid growing awareness of ADHD — and the different ways that it can manifest in children...

The study, which appears in the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, was based on data from the National Survey of Children's Health, which gathers detailed information from parents.

UPI reports that the British government covered up "a multi-decade tainted blood scandal, leading to thousands of related deaths, a report published Monday found." Britain's National Health Service allowed blood tainted with HIV and Hepatitis to be used on patients without their knowledge, leading to 3,000 deaths and more than 30,000 infections, according to the 2,527-page final report by Justice Brian Justice Langstaff, a former judge on the High Court of England and Wales. Langstaff oversaw a five-year investigation into the use of tainted blood and blood products in Britain's healthcare system between 1970 and 1991. The report blames multiple administrations over the time period for knowingly exposing victims to unacceptable risks...

In several cases, health officials lied about the risks to patients... The NHS also gave patients false reassurances, an attempt to "save face," failing victims "not once but repeatedly...." The situation could "largely, though not entirely, have been avoided," Langstaff found...

The British government on Monday began operating a support phone line for people and their families affected by the tainted blood scandal.
The article notes that Langstaff described the coverup as "subtle" but "pervasive" and "chilling in its implications...

"To save face and to save expense, there has been a hiding of much of the truth."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Hospital staff are forced to write notes by hand and deliver orders for tests and prescriptions in person in the ongoing fallout from a recent ransomware attack at the national health system Ascension. Ascension is one of the largest health systems in the United States, with some 140 hospitals located across 19 states and D.C. A spokesperson said in a statement that "unusual activity" was first detected on multiple technology network systems Ascension uses on Wednesday, May 8. Later, representatives confirmed that some of Ascension's electronic health records systems had been affected, along with systems used "to order certain tests, procedures and medications."

Some phone capabilities have also been offline, and patients have been unable to access portals used to view medical records and get in touch with their doctors. Due to these interruptions, hospital staff had to shift to "manual and paper based" processes. "Our care teams are trained for these kinds of disruptions and have initiated procedures to ensure patient care delivery continues to be safe and as minimally impacted as possible," an Ascension spokesperson said in a May 8 statement. Kris Fuentes, who works in the neonatal intensive care unit at Ascension Seton Medical Center in Austin, said she remembers when paper charting was the norm. But after so many years of relying on digital systems, she said her hospital wasn't ready to make such an abrupt shift. "It's kind of like we went back 20 years, but not even with the tools we had then," Fuentes said. "Our workflow has just been really unorganized, chaotic and at times, scary."

Fuentes said orders for medication, labs and imaging are being handwritten and then distributed by hand to various departments, whereas typically these requests are quickly accessed via computer. A lack of safety checks with these backup methods has introduced errors, she said, and every task is taking longer to complete. "Medications are taking longer to get to patients, lab results are taking longer to get back," she said. "Doctors need the lab results, often, to decide the next treatment plan, but if there's a delay in access to the labs, there's a delay in access to the care that they order." As of Tuesday, Ascension still had no timeline for when the issues might be resolved, and reported that it continued to work with "industry-leading cybersecurity experts" to investigate the ransomware attack and restore affected systems. The FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are also involved in the investigation. "While Ascension facilities remain open, a health system representative said on May 9 that in some cases, emergency patients were being triaged to different hospitals, and some non-emergent appointments and procedures were postponed," reports NPR. "Certain Ascension pharmacies are not operational, and patients are being asked to bring in prescription bottles or numbers."

"Individuals who are enrolled in Ascension health insurance plans are being directed to mail in monthly payments while the electronic payment system is down."

Hybrid and electric cars are more likely to hit pedestrians than petrol or diesel vehicles, due to their quieter engines that make them harder for pedestrians to hear. Other contributing factors include the tendency for drivers of electric cars to be younger and less experienced, and the vehicles' heavier weight and swift acceleration, increasing stopping distances. The Guardian reports: Data from 32 billion miles of battery-powered car travel and 3 trillion miles of petrol and diesel car trips showed that mile-for-mile electric and hybrid cars were twice as likely to hit pedestrians than fossil fuel-powered cars, and three times more likely to do so in urban areas. "Electric cars are a hazard to pedestrians because they are less likely to be heard than petrol or diesel cars," said Phil Edwards, first author on the study and professor of epidemiology and statistics at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. "The government needs to mitigate these risks if they are going to phase out the sale of petrol and diesel cars." "If you're moving to an electric car, remember it's a new kind of vehicle," Edwards added. "They are much quieter than the old-fashioned cars, and pedestrians have learned to navigate roads by listening for traffic. Drivers of these vehicles need to be extra cautious."

Most vehicles on the road are petrol or diesel and these were involved in three-quarters of pedestrian collisions. But for the same distance travelled, battery-powered cars were more dangerous. The average annual pedestrian casualty rate per 100m miles travelled was 5.16 for electric and hybrid cars compared with 2.4 for petrol and diesel cars, according to the study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. In rural settings, battery-powered cars were no more dangerous than petrol or diesel, but in towns and cities they were three times more likely to collide with pedestrians, the researchers found. Since July 2019, all new hybrid and electric vehicles sold in Europe have been required to have an acoustic vehicle alerting system that emits sound when the car is travelling slowly, but there are hundreds of thousands of electric cars on the road without the devices. "If government made sure these systems were installed in all electric vehicles and retrofitted them to older electric cars, that would be a good start," Edwards said, adding that the Green Cross Code also "probably needs updating."

The FDA has approved Neuralink to implant its brain chip in a second patient. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company also outlined fixes to an electrode problem that caused its chip to detach from the first patient's brain. They were unharmed and could still control a computer mouse using their thoughts. Axios reports: Neuralink, which is owned by Elon Musk, said it is seeking applications for another patient with quadriplegia to test if the device can allow a person to do tasks like control a phone and computer. It outlined fixes that included embedding some of the device's wiring deeper into the brain, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a document and a person familiar with the company.

Neuralink rival Synchron is preparing a large-scale clinical trial with an eye toward seeking commercial approval of its implant. Mass General Brigham has also launched a collaborative effort with stakeholders and the FDA to accelerate the development of the implanted devices.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Medical Xpress: A team of medical researchers at the National Children's Medical Center, Children's Hospital, Fudan University, in China, has developed a technique to freeze and thaw brain tissue without causing damage. In their study, published in the journal Cell Reports Methods, the group tested bathing brain organoid tissue in candidate chemicals before freezing them using liquid nitrogen. [...] The work involved dipping or soaking brain organoids (brain tissue grown from stem cells) in candidate compounds and then freezing and thawing them to see how they fared. After many attempts, they found one combination of solutions that worked best -- a mix of ethylene glycol, methylcellulose DMSO and Y27632. They named the solution mix MEDY.

The research team then tested MEDY under a variety of conditions to see how well it prevented damage from freezing. The conditions involved changing variables, such as the age of the organoids prior to freezing and how long they were soaked in a MEDY solution. They then allowed the organoids to resume growing after they were thawed for up to 150 days. The researchers found little difference between organoids that had been frozen and those that had not -- even those that had been frozen for as long as 18 months. As a final test, the research team used their technique on a sample of brain tissue obtained from a live human patient and found that it worked just as well.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Hims & Hers Health, one of the online pharmacies that got its start prescribing dick pills, is now offering knockoff versions of GLP-1 weight loss drugs. Hims & Hers says it will offer drugs that mimic Ozempic and Wegovy, the active ingredient of which is semaglutide. The copycat versions are made by compounding pharmacies. The formulations aren't the same as the FDA-approved versions of the drug and haven't been directly evaluated by the FDA, either. But they're cheaper than the real thing: $199 a month, compared to the branded version, which can cost more than $1,000 a month without insurance.

Compounding pharmacies can make knockoff versions of branded drugs when they are in shortage, as the GLP-1 drugs -- prescribed for diabetes and weight loss -- currently are. The FDA has already received reports of adverse events for compounded versions of semaglutide. Hims & Hers says it "conducted extensive research for over a year" into finding a supplier, but does not name the one it chose to partner with. "Over the last year, we have grown in our conviction -- based on our medical experts' evaluation and the strength of our infrastructure -- that if done properly, compounded GLP-1s are safe and effective," the company said in its statement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Proteins in the blood could warn people of cancer more than seven years before it is diagnosed, according to research [published in the journal Nature Communications]. Scientists at the University of Oxford studied blood samples from more than 44,000 people in the UK Biobank, including over 4,900 people who subsequently had a cancer diagnosis. They compared the proteins of people who did and did not go on to be diagnosed with cancer and identified 618 proteins linked to 19 types of cancer, including colon, lung, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and liver.

The study, funded by Cancer Research UK and published in Nature Communications, also found 107 proteins associated with cancers diagnosed more than seven years after the patient's blood sample was collected and 182 proteins that were strongly associated with a cancer diagnosis within three years. The authors concluded that some of these proteins could be used to detect cancer much earlier and potentially provide new treatment options, though further research was needed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Richard "Rick" Slayman, the first human to receive a genetically modified pig kidney transplant, has died almost two months after the procedure. Slayman, who had end-stage kidney disease, underwent the transplant in March at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston at age 62. The hospital said in a statement on Saturday that there was "no indication" that his death was the result of the transplant. The transplant surgeon had said he hoped the transplant would function for at least two years.

"The Mass General transplant team is deeply saddened at the sudden passing of Mr. Rick Slayman," read the hospital statement. "Mr. Slayman will forever be seen as a beacon of hope to countless transplant patients worldwide and we are deeply grateful for his trust and willingness to advance the field of xenotransplantation." The surgery was a milestone for the field of xenotransplantation -- the transplant of organs from one species to another -- as a way to alleviate the organ shortage for people who need transplants. The effort to genetically modify animal organs is in hopes that the human body will not reject the foreign tissue. NPR notes that there are more than 100,000 people in the U.S. on the waitlist for organs.