CHIP is finally getting funded

It took 114 days, but the Children’s Health Insurance Program finally has funding. Both the Senate and the House passed a bill yesterday to extend CHIP funding for another six years and open the government back up for business for three weeks while lawmakers hash out other contentious concerns, including a deal on immigration. The CHIP bill comes just in the nick of time — the temporary patch Congress passed to fund CHIP only ran through mid-January. There still isn’t a funding plan for community health centers, which saw their funding lapse at the same time as CHIP.

Federal health employees are breathing a (temporary) sigh of relief over the spending bill. So is the medical device industry — the bill delays an ACA tax on medical device sales for two years.

The latest on this year's severe flu season

(CDC)

Public health officials are keeping a close eye on the flu as it continues to spread nationwide. Thirty children have died from flu-related causes between Oct. 1 and Jan. 13, according to the latest numbers from the CDC, and the rate of flu hospitalizations continues to rise. The influenza A virus H3N2 has caused the bulk of illnesses in most parts of the country this year.

Hospitals have been swamped during this year’s severe flu season, and some are scrambling to deal with a shortage of IV fluids after manufacturing plants in Puerto Rico were damaged by hurricanes. Some hospitals have started giving patients Gatorade and Pedialyte when possible to save IV bags for patients with severe dehydration.

Two polio vaccinators killed in Pakistan

A mother and daughter working to vaccinate people against polio in Pakistan were shot dead last week, the New York Times reports. Pakistan is one of only two countries with ongoing polio transmission — the other being Afghanistan — but the country has made significant progress in reducing cases of polio paralysis in recent years. Last year, there were only eight confirmed cases, compared to 306 cases of polio paralysis just four years earlier. But eradication efforts have been targeted in violent attacks by militant factions that oppose vaccinations. In 2015, a bombing near a polio center in Quetta killed more than a dozen people. A leader of the campaign said the recent attack won’t seriously disrupt eradication efforts in the country.

Inside STAT: Delivering cancer drugs with the help of origami

origami meets biomedical research. (dom smith / stat)

Beating back cancer isn’t just about getting the right treatment. It’s also about getting that treatment to the right spot while minimizing damage to the healthy tissue around a tumor. For patients with advanced ovarian cancer, that can mean pumping chemo drugs into the abdominal cavity, which is a long and painful process. Engineer Katerina Mantzavinou is working on a potential new way to deliver those cancer-fighting drugs that’s inspired by origami. The idea: Tuck a drug inside a 3-D printed, folded structure, pass that through a small tube into a tumor, and then let the origami structure unfold to deliver the drug. STAT’s Dominic Smith explores Mantzavinou’s work in a new video — watch here.

Emergency room prices are rising, and other health spending trends

Health care spending is spiking — but people in the U.S. aren’t using more health care, according to a new analysis from the Health Care Cost Institute. So what’s speeding the pace of health spending? Here’s a look at some of the factors at play:

§ Prescription drugs are getting more expensive. Between 2012 and 2016, prescription drug spending grew 27 percent, despite fewer people using brand-name prescriptions and generic drug prices staying the same or dropping slightly. The authors say the spending bump is due to price hikes for prescription drugs.

§ Emergency room visits are pricier. The average price for an ER visit grew nearly 32 percent over the five-year study period.

§ Surgery is increasingly costly, which is driving up spending for both inpatient and outpatient care. The average price for a surgical admission rose nearly 30 percent between 2012 and 2016, while the average price for outpatient surgery rose more than 19 percent.

Does marijuana impact cardiovascular health?

The evidence to determine whether marijuana use can affect a person’s risk of cardiovascular disease just doesn’t cut it, according to a new review of published research. There’s been a debate in the medical community about whether marijuana raises the risk of heart attack and other cardiovascular problems. So researchers looked at 24 observational studies of adults who used any type of marijuana, their risk factors like diabetes and obesity, and outcomes such as stroke or death due to heart disease. The takeaway: There hasn’t been enough rigorous research to draw a conclusion about whether chronic marijuana use has an effect on cardiovascular health.

What to read around the web today

§ The religious activists on the rise inside Trump's health department. Politico

§ 'Pharmacy deserts' a growing health concern in Chicago, experts, residents say. Chicago Tribune

§ States face costly conundrum: how to treat inmates with hepatitis C. KCUR / Kaiser Heatlh News

The latest from STAT Plus

§ Two biotechs vying for the first peanut allergy treatment have readouts coming soon. Here’s what to expect.

§ With Juno deal, Celgene bets on the future of CAR-T — and its own.

Thanks for reading! More tomorrow,