A billion-dollar opioid bill, smoking among pregnant women, & saline safety

Your rundown of the new billion-dollar opioid bill

A group of eight senators have unveiled a bipartisan bill that would bump up funding for addiction treatment and prevention by roughly $1 billion. Here’s what to know about the CARA 2.0 Act, billed as the sequel to the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016:

§ The bill would establish a three-day limit on initial opioid prescriptions. Only prescriptions for cancer, chronic pain, and hospice care would be exempted. That falls in line with 2016 guidelines from the CDC.

§ It would cement provisions that allow nurse practitioners to prescribe buprenorphine, a type of medication-assisted treatment. The bill would also waive the current 100-patient limit for doctors who want to prescribe the drug.

§ If it passes, the measure would be the most substantive step Congress has taken to tackle the opioid epidemic since President Trump took office.

STAT’s Lev Facher has more here.

Justice Department ramps up its opioid efforts

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is ramping up its own efforts to combat the crisis. Attorney General Jeff Sessions says the agency will heighten its investigations into opioid manufacturers and distributors and create a task force to look into those players. The department will also get involved in the ongoing lawsuits against drug makers — Sessions says the DOJ will submit a statement of interest in a lawsuit against opioid manufacturers and distributors for "false, deceptive, and unfair marketing" practices. The announcements come ahead of an opioids summit that's happening at the White House later this week.

Smoking in pregnant women is troublingly common

Health officials say more than 7 percent of women who gave birth in 2016 smoked cigarettes while pregnant. A look at numbers:

§ The breakdown: Nearly 17 percent of American Indian and Alaskan Native women smoked cigarettes while pregnant, compared to just 0.6 percent of Asian women, who had the lowest rate.

§ More details: Smoking rates were highest among women ages 20 to 24, nearly 11 percent of whom smoked during pregnancy. And among women who had a high school education or higher, the prevalence of smoking while pregnant decreased as education level increased.

§ The takeaway: The findings are troubling, the CDC says, because tobacco use during pregnancy has been tied to a slew of problems in infants, including preterm birth, low birthweight, and birth defects.

For children diagnosed with rare diseases, traditional drug development timelines are not good enough. Collaborative partnerships are imperative to accelerate those timelines and expedite time to market for rare disease therapies. Learn more.

Inside STAT: Can a marijuana ingredient curb cravings for opioids?

yasmin hurd is searching for new ways to treat addiction. (biz herman for stat)

Neuroscientist Yasmin Hurd spent the early years of her career collecting the brains of people who died of overdoses, many of them on heroin. And as she’s watched the opioid crisis unfold, she’s been trying to figure out how to intervene — could she modify or reverse the way addiction changed the brains being studied in her lab?Hurd has honed in on cannabidiol, a compound in the marijuana plant, as a potential way to curb cravings for heroin and other opioids. And she’s trying to rally other scientists to do the same, by creating a consortium to conduct cannabidiol clinical trials across the globe. I visited Hurd’s New York lab to learn more about her work — read here.

Blood transfusions are on the decline

Blood transfusions are growing less common in the U.S., according to new research. Doctors at Johns Hopkins looked at inpatient hospital discharges in the U.S. between 1993 and 2014 to find trends in red blood cell, plasma, and platelet transfusions. Between 2011 and 2014, red blood cell transfusions fell from 7 percent to 6 percent and plasma transfusions fell slightly as well, while platelet transfusions stayed roughly the same. So what’s driving the decline? The study’s authors say it might have something to do with blood conservation efforts, among other things.

There might be a safer option for IV bags than saline

Saline solution is the most common IV fluid administered to patients in the United States — but given concerns that saline can contribute to kidney problems, experts have wondered if other fluids might be safer. In a pair of new studies in NEJM, researchers found that giving patients other fluids with electrolytes more similar to what's in blood was associated with a small decrease in serious kidney problems compared to standard saline. That finding was based on data from more than 15,000 patients in intensive care units and 13,000 patients outside ICUs. The authors say the cost for the different fluid therapies is roughly the same.

What to read around the web today

§ Federal watchdog finds workplace safety problems at nuclear weapons lab in New Mexico. The Santa Fe New Mexican / ProPublica

§ U.S. prescription drug costs are a crime. Bloomberg

§ Apple is launching medical clinics to deliver the 'world's best health care experience' to its employees. CNBC