Good morning. The summer may be winding down, but I think you'll agree the news surely isn't. In answer to a reader's question, we're not going on hiatus, except on Labor Day itself.

White House directs agencies to open up access to federally funded studies

In what could be a watershed moment for publishers of scientific journals, the White House yesterday told health and science agencies to make federally funded studies immediately available to the public after publication, rather than after papers have spent 12 months behind a paywall. Open-access advocates — and both President Biden and former President Trump — have been pushing for such a move, which could upend the business models of scientific journals reliant on subscription fees.

In announcing the guidance from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, Director Alondra Nelson pointed to the Covid-19 pandemic, saying in a memo to federal agencies that “in the wake of the public health crisis, government, industry, and scientists voluntarily worked together to adopt an immediate public access policy, which yielded powerful results: research and data flowed effectively, new accessible insights super-charged the rate of discovery, and translation of science soared.” STAT’s Sarah Owermohle has more.

Opioid overdoses that aren't fatal are rising, too

Throughout the opioid overdose epidemic, concern has understandably focused on overdose deaths, which surpassed 100,000 in a recent 12-month span. A new CDC report tracked nonfatal overdoses that involved emergency medical services — and not necessarily transport to hospital emergency departments, which people increasingly refuse — from January 2018 to March 2022. It found these EMS encounters rose 4% quarterly across 21 states surveyed. That translates into a jump from 98.1 to 179.1 per 10,000 total EMS encounters.

There were differences:

More men than women overdosed, a disparity that widened over time.
Rates were highest among non-Hispanic white and non-Hispanic Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander people, but rates grew the most among non-Hispanic Black and Hispanic people.
Both rates and rate increases were highest in urban counties and counties with higher unemployment rates.

Studying the complexity of chronic conditions

Living with a chronic condition — or for many people, more than one — can make the simplest things complex. There’s the medical component, of course, and also coping with daily life. STAT’s Isabella Cueto talked with Nathan Shippee of the University of Minnesota about how to work with this complexity.

Why does patient complexity matter in health care?
Practically speaking, what complexity adds is uncertainty. We don't like uncertainty if we're trying to manage somebody's health. … Things don't always complicate somebody's life and their care in ways that you would expect.

Why have you decided to focus some of your work on complexity models in chronic disease?
Chronic disease, basically by definition, is something you can't cure. If you take everybody who's got chronic conditions and then you add up all the years and all the lives that are lived with chronic conditions, that's a pretty big footprint.

Read the full interview here.

Closer look: In-home health care is hot. Just ask Amazon

(adobe)

There’s a bidding war going on over Signify Health, a health technology business that delivers highly detailed assessments of patients by visiting them in their bedrooms and living rooms, creating better visibility — and clearer data — about their lives and health status. Signify’s ability to collect and analyze a richer cross-section of information about patients is seen as essential to delivering more effective care in and out of the home, STAT’s Casey Ross and Katie Palmer report.

In-home care is quickly becoming the biggest battlefield in America’s biggest business, as companies look to move health care outside institutional walls. Read more on why Signify could fetch multibillion-dollar offers from CVS, UnitedHealth Group — and Amazon, which is exploring how to deliver more medical services to people in their homes and offices.

Wearing glasses and catching Covid: link TBD

Remember when it seemed like eyeglasses might provide protection against Covid-19 infection? The question still isn’t settled, based on a new JAMA Ophthalmology study. The researchers followed more than 2,100 employees of a rescue corps in Sweden and Denmark, more than two-thirds of whom wore glasses or contact lenses, from June through August 2020. At first it looked like wearing glasses was associated with fewer Covid infections in Sweden — where Covid prevalence was higher — but after taking into account sex, age, and job (ambulance, other health care, office, roadside assistance), that link disappeared.

“These results provide inconclusive findings regarding whether wearing one’s own glasses is associated with a decreased risk of Covid-19 infections,” the authors write. The jury may still be out, an editorial suggests: A Norwegian randomized clinical trial “may provide a definitive answer on this issue in 1 to 2 years.”

Eating with our eyes — and brains

Talk about a feast for the eyes. A new study in Current Biology describes a specific part of the brain’s visual cortex that zeroes in on food — joining components like faces, places, bodies, and text that have their own selective neurons. To make their discovery, the researchers queried a database of full-brain fMRI responses to 10,000 images of different scenes or objects. Even though different foods — pasta vs. a carrot — might not look like each other, certain neurons in the visual cortex lit up in response to them all.

Shape didn’t fool these neurons: A banana got a response but a crescent yellow moon did not. Oddly, processed food, like a pizza slice, provoked a stronger response than raw food, like broccoli. That might be a question for monkeys to answer in a future study: “Food preferences are famously culture-specific and learned,” the authors write.

What to read around the web today

When private equity takes over a nursing home, The New Yorker
Formula for disaster: How deadly bacteria spread in a Similac factory — and caused the U.S. formula shortage, Bloomberg Businessweek
Pfizer’s experimental RSV vaccine protects older adults in study, STAT
Opinion: Polio in New York: A call to action for U.S. pediatricians and public health to work together, STAT
Opinion: Fragmented outbreak data will lead to a repeat of Covid-19, Nature