TV News LIES

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission sued the country's three largest pharmacy benefit managers on Friday, accusing them of steering diabetes patients toward higher-priced insulin to reap millions of dollars in rebates from pharmaceutical companies.

The case accuses UnitedHealth Group Inc's Optum unit, CVS Health Corp's CVS Caremark and Cigna Corp's Express Scripts of unfairly excluding lower-cost insulin products from lists of drugs covered by insurers.

or the first time in decades, public health data shows a sudden and hopeful drop in drug overdose deaths across the U.S.

"This is exciting," said Dr. Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute On Drug Abuse [NIDA], the federal laboratory charged with studying addiction. "This looks real. This looks very, very real."

National surveys compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already show an unprecedented decline in drug deaths of roughly 10.6 percent. That's a huge reversal from recent years when fatal overdoses regularly increased by double-digit percentages.

Some researchers believe the data will show an even larger decline in drug deaths when federal surveys are updated to reflect improvements being seen at the state level, especially in the eastern U.S.

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As flu season nears, so do new COVID-19 variants.

A newly discovered COVID strain known as XEC continues to spread rapidly across multiple countries, including the U.S.

Scripps Research’s Outbreak.info page, last updated on Sept. 5, reported 95 XEC cases across 12 U.S. states and 15 different countries.

However, Australia based data integration specialist Mike Honey wrote on X Saturday that the new strain, which emerged in Berlin last June, has shown up in hundreds more patients across 27 countries in Europe, North America and Asia.

Omicron variant KP.3.1.1, also known as deFLuQE, made up over half (52.7%) of COVID-19 cases between Sept. 1 and Sept. 14. However XEC and a variant known as MV.1 seem poised to become the next dominant strains, scientists say.

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The most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that last month nearly half of the United States have reported "very high" levels of COVID-19 activity.

As concerns with COVID have waned across the U.S., the CDC has come to rely on wastewater data to track the virus, which often lags several weeks behind current case counts.

Data collected between Aug. 25 and Aug. 31 by the CDC showed that 23 states have reported "very high" levels of wastewater viral activity nationwide. The data was published on Sept. 5.

Here are the overall numbers of the states and territories that have reported wastewater viral activity levels as of Aug. 31.

Typically, wastewater data are updated weekly and the data that is published shows the results for the prior week. However, the results can take up to five days to a week to be published online. Thus, the data from Aug. 31 is considered the most recent data.

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Girls exposed to certain chemicals that are common ingredients in household products may be starting puberty comparatively early, a new study has found.

Substances of particular concern include musk ambrette — a fragrance used in some detergents, perfumes and personal care products — and a group of medications called cholinergic agonists, according to the study, published on Tuesday in Endocrinology.

These chemicals are all known as “hormone-disrupting” or “endocrine-disrupting” compounds, due to their tendency to block or interfere with hormone function in the body’s endocrine system.

To draw their conclusions, National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers performed an initial screening of 10,000 environmental compounds and then studied the activities of select substances using lines of both rodent and human brain cells that control reproductive functions.

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A ballot initiative in Missouri that would overturn the state’s near-total abortion ban ran into a roadblock Friday after a judge agreed with anti-abortion opponents that the measure did not inform voters of the ramifications.

Cole County Circuit Judge Christopher Limbaugh sided with anti-abortion lawmakers and activists in his ruling, arguing Amendment 3 did not adequately inform voters who signed petitions about the amendment’s ramifications

He found the measure was “insufficient” and a “blatant violation” of the statutory requirements because it failed to list the laws that would be repealed if the amendment was passed.

But he declined to immediately issue an injunction to allow time for proponents to appeal ahead of Tuesday’s deadline.

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