Health

 Axios - Most states allow prisons to charge incarcerated people medical and "room and board" fees, locking them into cycles of debt and possibly more incarceration, a recent Axios review of new data found. The debt wheel targets the majority of the estimated 1.8 million inmates in state prisons and local jails, putting up more obstacles to escaping the poverty that likely contributed to arrests in the first place.

The fees raise hundreds of millions of dollars for victims' funds, DNA databases and other programs, but also help states expand efforts to incarcerate more people.

Data collected by the advocacy group Campaign Zero, reviewed by Axios, found 43 states explicitly allow for medical fees for incarcerated adults.  More

Axios - Divisions between the federal government and the medical establishment are deepening ahead of the respiratory virus season after the Trump administration purged at least 10 professional societies from federal working groups on vaccine policy.The friction could lead to dueling vaccine recommendations that could add to confusion and distrust surrounding shots for COVID, flu and RSV.

Major medical organizations last week reported being booted from working groups that advise Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s handpicked CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.... The government labeled organizations including the Infectious Diseases Society and the American Medical Association "special interest groups" that inject bias in decision-making....

Meanwhile, an ad hoc group of infectious disease and vaccine experts calling itself the Vaccine Integrity Project is planning its own public meeting later this month to present the latest peer-reviewed research around COVID vaccines and act as a kind of shadow ACIP. More 

Time - At least eight people along the Gulf Coast have died and 22 others have been infected in what local health officials are warning is a rise in cases involving “flesh-eating” bacteria. The Louisiana Department of Health issued an alert last week saying that there had been 17 cases of Vibrio vulnificus in the state so far this year. All of those patients were hospitalized, and four died.

“This represents a higher number of Vibrio vulnificus cases and deaths than are typically reported,” the department said. “During the same time period over the previous 10 years, an average of seven Vibrio vulnificus cases and one death were reported each year.”

Meanwhile, health officials in Florida have reported 13 cases this year, as of July 24. Four of those cases have resulted in death. Public health experts have generally attributed the rise in cases to climate change.