Flu foreshadowing

While health officials are tracking the spread of bird flu, a different strain of everyone’s favorite virus — H1N1 — has been mutating into not one but two variants that resist Tamiflu. Oh, and both are already in the US (and, in fact, on every continent (except Antarctica)).

The good news is that “These mutated viruses retained sensitivity to other anti-influenza medications, including a newer one, baloxavir marboxil.”

The other good news is that this has happened before, and those nasty strains tend to get outcompeted, so this is probably just hair-trigger panic about the flu.

Probably.

Beeting heart issues

If you’re a post-menopausal woman, you might want to choke down some beetroot juice. A study out of Penn State found that “daily consumption of beetroot juice […] may improve blood vessel function enough to reduce future heart disease risk.”

Beetroot juice has lots of nitrate, which the body converts to nitric oxide. And nitric oxide can dilate blood vessels — a useful feature especially if you do have a heart attack (or just an episode of limited blood flow).

Bees sniff cancer

Oh, Mother Nature, how she likes to play. Her latest trick: Giving bees the ability to smell lung cancer. Mm hmm.

Not only did Michigan State University researchers find that honeybees can smell lung cancer, they can actually differentiate different kinds of tumors.

Wait, it gets cooler. How did they know the bees could detect it? They created a harness to hold a single bee in place while they stuck an electrode into its brain.

“We pass those odors on to the antenna of the honeybees and recorded the neural signals from their brain. We see a change in the honeybee’s neural firing response.”

The obvious plan would be to use swarms of honeybees as an alternative to biopsies, but that’s probably a bad idea. (If nothing else, putting it in the form of a take-home test would be difficult.) Instead the MSU folks hope to use what they’ve learned to create an artificial ‘nose’ of sorts.

“Plant” doesn’t mean “healthy”

If you thought that eating plant-based burgers was a healthy option (looking at you, Impossible Whopper), bad news: They’re so over-processed that it negates any health benefit.

New research has found that eating plant-based ultra-processed foods may increase your risk of heart disease and early death,” according to an international group of researchers.

Why? They may not have meat, but they have plenty of fat and sodium and they’re a bit lax on the nutrients. Turkey burgers for the win!

And it gets worse

Eating ultra-processed foods can keep you up at night. A three-year French study found “a statistically significant association between consumption of ultra-processed foods and chronic insomnia independent of sociodemographic, lifestyle, diet quality, and mental health status characteristics.”

There is the usual caveat here: The Frenchies found an association but can’t determine causation, so it’s possible that the opposite is true — people with insomnia are more likely to hit the kitchen at 2:00 am for some Slim Jims.

The Long Read: Behind the curtain

A pair of researchers — one Canadian, one Dutch — went through the documents opioid maker Mallinckrodt was forced to release in its settlement with the US government. (Mallinckrodt actually sold a heck of a lot more opioids than Purdue Pharma.)

The records showed all the tactics Mallinckrodt used to increase sales, addiction be damned.

The documents outline a smorgasbord of tactics to achieve greater sales — from shaping the language of medicine through designing continuing medical education (CME) courses and recruiting physicians to serve as influencers, to planting articles in scientific journals. And all of this against the backdrop of an epidemic of addiction.