Tylenol lawsuit dismissed

A federal judge ruled against plaintiffs who claimed that acetaminophen during their pregnancy caused their kids to have autism, ADHD, or other issues. The “evidence” they presented wasn’t evidence at all, she ruled. Without evidence to present, the suit will likely be dismissed.

“The unstructured approach adopted by the plaintiffs’ experts permitted cherry-picking, allowed a results-driven analysis, and obscured the complexities, inconsistencies, and weaknesses in the underlying data.”

How did this start in the first place? “[A] a 2021 statement in the medical journal Nature Reviews Endocrinology […] that called for increased awareness and research into the potential risks of prenatal exposure to the drug.”

A different kind of Christmas miracle?

File under “Go figure”: When a new Doctor Who episode is aired during the holidays, fewer people die in the UK the next year. That’s what biostatisticians at the University of Birmingham found — and it was good enough to get published in the BMJ.

In time series analyses, an association was found between broadcasts during the festive period and subsequent lower annual death rates.

In particular, episodes shown on Christmas Day were associated with about six fewer deaths per 10,000 person years in England and Wales and four fewer deaths per 10,000 person years in the UK.

If you think that’s a stretch, their hypothesis is even stretchier: The Doctor Who findings “highlight the positive effect doctors can have when working during the festive period.”

CMS: Go easy taking kids off Medicaid

Georgia is one of nine states that CMS has warned about its Medicaid unwinding — specifically because of a lot of children have lost their health coverage. The administration is asking those states to take advantage of federal options designed to make it easier for people to renew.

• Those nine states are responsible for 60% of the kids who’ve been removed from Medicaid.
• About 9% of Georgia’s kids on Medicaid were removed from the program.
• About 3 million kids across the country have lost coverage^* since states were allowed to pare back after the pandemic.
• The 10 remaining states that have not expanded Medicaid “have disenrolled more kids than all of the expansion states combined.”

The agency can’t force the states to do anything differently (unless they’re found to break federal guidelines) but the feds are doing their best to try to ensure no one can’t get healthcare because of procedural errors, which have been responsible for a large portion of disenrollments.

^* Some of them have likely been able to get coverage through an Obamacare marketplace or via a parent’s employer’s policy. 

The Long Read: Milking the Cash Cow edition

States are getting billions in opioid settlement money, so out of the woodwork come the companies ready to help them spend it. From pill-disposal pouches, to unproven therapies, and even to a lasso for detaining people who are overdosing, officials are being flooded with sales pitches. Everyone wants a slice of the settlement pie.

A big concern is that officials will be swayed more by flashy presentations than by the organizations that might actually make best use of the money.

For example, fancy, lockable prescription bottles sound great, but…

Today’s crisis of fatal overdoses is largely driven by illicit fentanyl. Even if studies suggest the companies’ products make people more likely to safely store and dispose of medications, that’s unlikely to stem the record levels of deaths seen in recent years.

As one person put it, “Safe storage and disposal can be accomplished with a locking cabinet and toilet.”

Non-pharma medical news you could probably do without

When snails are stressed^*, their slime — left on a lettuce leaf — is more likely to carry rat lungworm larvae. That bit of research comes out of the University of Hawai’i.

Their advice: “Washing produce, to dislodge and remove any snails or snail slime, is recommended to prevent possible infection.”

^* “including heat, snail/slug bait (a pesticide) and physical disturbance”