TV News LIES

The British drugmaker GSK has struck an agreement to make a payment of up to $2.2bn (£1.7bn) to resolve litigation brought in the US over its heartburn treatment Zantac.

The company said it had struck agreements with 10 plaintiff law firms who represent about 93%, roughly 80,000, of the US state court product liability cases pending against it.

The company said in a stock market statement on Wednesday that it would make the aggregate payment to resolve all such cases handled by those plaintiff firms that meet agreed eligibility and participation criteria.

The claimants had alleged their cancers were linked to Zantac, known generically as ranitidine. GSK had argued there was no evidence to suggest an increased cancer risk and has not admitted any liability in the settlements.

More...

Covid-19 could be a powerful risk factor for heart attacks and strokes for as long as three years after an infection, a large new study suggests.

The study was published Wednesday in the medical journal Atherosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology. It relied on medical records from roughly a quarter of a million people who were enrolled in a large database called the UK Biobank.

Within this dataset, researchers identified more than 11,000 people who had a positive lab test for Covid-19 documented in their medical records in 2020; nearly 3,000 of them had been hospitalized for their infections. They compared these groups with more than 222,000 others in the same database who didn’t have a history of Covid-19 over the same time frame.

Just one week after a Georgia judge restored broad access to abortion in the state by blocking its six-week abortion ban, the Georgia supreme court ruled on Monday to reinstate the ban.

The ban will take effect at 5pm local time on Monday and remain in effect while litigation over it plays out.

Abortion rights supporters quickly condemned the decision, which also came down weeks after news broke that two Georgia mothers, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, died after being unable to access legal abortions.

“Every minute this harmful six-week abortion ban is in place, Georgians suffer,” Monica Simpson, executive director of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, said in a statement. SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective is a plaintiff in the legal battle over the ban.

More...

The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a decision barring emergency abortions that violate the law in Texas, which has one of the country’s strictest abortion bans.

The justices did not detail their reasoning for keeping in place a lower court order that said hospitals cannot be required to provide pregnancy terminations if they would break Texas law. There were no publicly noted dissents.

The strain, known as XEC, is gaining a foothold in the United States, accounting for an estimated 5.7% of new cases in the past two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.

“We don’t know if it will have legs and soar up in the charts,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, a professor of medicine and an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. “But it has the features that could make it the one to watch.”

XEC caught the eye of experts as it spread quickly in parts of Europe in recent weeks. Still, a lot remains unknown about the strain.

“Once again, Covid is showing that it is not finished mutating, and we’re still seeing the limitations of our vaccines in controlling it,” said Rick Bright, an immunologist and the former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

More...

California last week clocked its fourth case of locally transmitted dengue fever this year — an alarming rise in a sometimes-deadly disease that experts fear could be fueled by climate change.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health confirmed the newest incidence of the mosquito-borne illness in a resident of Panorama City, a neighborhood in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. The department noted that the individual had not traveled to areas where dengue is endemic, and that the case appeared unrelated to three others, also locally acquired, that were reported in the county earlier this month.

“We are seeing the local transmission of dengue, which is unprecedented in Los Angeles County,” Muntu Davis, Los Angeles County health officer, said in a statement.