A CDC report found that heat-related illnesses accounted for a bigger share of visits across hundreds of emergency departments in the US during the warm season last year, compared with the five prior seasons. Data shows the number of total visits due to heat-related illness increased to 180 out of every 100,000 total visits last year, from 151 out of every 100,000 visits between 2018 and 2022.

Nurses have communication skills that prepare them to use their voices in the policy arena, and they should consider doing so to advance the profession and support their peers, said North Carolina state Sen. Gale Adcock, a nurse practitioner who is the only health care professional in the state legislature. "Despite nurses' being the largest segment of the health care workforce, our voices are often missing from crucial conversations about access to care, health inequities and upstream problems affecting people's health," said Adcock.

The World Health Organization issued a new report that updates terminology for pathogens that transmit through the air, including those that cause respiratory infections such as COVID-19, measles, tuberculosis, influenza, measles and severe acute respiratory syndrome. According to the report, "through the air transmission" describes infectious diseases that spread through airborne transmission or inhalation, in which infectious respiratory particles are expelled into the air and inhaled by another person, and through direct deposition, in which particles are expelled into the air and land on another person's exposed mouth, nose or eyes.

A study in JCI Insight found that an experimental at-home urine test that tracks tiny DNA fragments from tumors may aid in the early detection of head and neck cancers. The test may also be adjusted to spot the DNA fragments from other cancers, such as breast cancer and leukemia, according to researchers.

A study in Psychiatric Research found that the ketogenic diet may alleviate symptoms of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia while improving metabolic health, with participants experiencing a 30% reduction in psychiatric symptoms and a 10% average weight loss. "Understanding the mechanisms and potential synergies between psychiatric treatment and metabolic improvements can also inform the development of more effective interventions," the researchers said.

Eli Lilly & Co. said in a release that its weight loss medication Zepbound may reduce obstructive sleep apnea in adult patients with obesity. Results have yet to be peer reviewed and published, but the company said two studies support the findings.

Researchers at the University of Montana Center for Translational Medicine are working to develop a more effective vaccine against tuberculosis. They are studying how vaccine adjuvants such as aluminum salts or fat molecules may boost a person's immune response, and how immunizations may be made more effective for different age groups.

The World Health Organization's Smart AI Resource Assistant for Health, known as SARAH, has demonstrated several flaws in the two weeks since it was introduced, including providing outdated information and failing to provide answers to questions such as where to get a mammogram in Washington, D.C. The bot's information is limited to data from September 2021 and prior because it was trained on ChatGPT 3.5; it also frequently defaults to telling users to "consult with your health-care provider" or visit a WHO Website.

Research shows that a Medicare initiative called Chronic Care Management decreased patients' emergency department and inpatient visits and reduced total health spending, but only a small proportion of eligible enrollees have participated. A number of businesses have been started to help physicians participate, but physician uptake has still been low for reasons including lack of capacity to monitor patients outside office visits, high documentation requirements, and reluctance to require people to participate when they do not have a supplemental policy.

States across the nation are considering and enacting measures that would place controls on private-equity acquisition activity in the health care sector. More than a dozen states have acted to require private equity companies and other buyers to notify them of proposed transactions.

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