The Washington Post shows how one of its staff photographers found enduring traces of the sixteenth President across our country.

The House of Representatives is on a District work break for the next weeks while the Senate is engaged in Committee business and floor voting on Capitol Hill.

On Wednesday, February 15, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will hold a hearing “to examine countering illicit fentanyl trafficking.” The Wall Street Journal adds

A veterinary tranquilizer that can cause serious wounds for regular users is spreading menace within the illicit drug supply. 

Xylazine, authorized only for animals, is one ingredient in an increasingly toxic brew of illicit drugs that killed a record of nearly 107,000 people in the U.S. in 2021. It is typically mixed with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that itself has broadly infiltrated U.S. drug supply, including in supplies of cocaine and methamphetamine. Taken together, the volatile mixing means drug users often don’t know what’s in the substances they take. 

Dealers may mix xylazine into fentanyl to save money, federal law-enforcement authorities said. The drug—known as “tranq” among some users—can be purchased at low prices from Chinese suppliers and offset some of the opioid in the mix. Its presence in the drug supply is part of the arms race between criminals seeking to enhance their products and authorities trying to disrupt the market. Public-health authorities are working on ways to monitor the constantly changing drug market.

For users, xylazine can also lengthen a high—with serious risks. The overdose-reversal drug naloxone that can be critical to saving fentanyl users doesn’t work against xylazine. And users can become physically dependent on xylazine in addition to fentanyl, complicating treatment. 

No bueno.

From the Omicron and siblings front, NPR Shots tells us

In another sign of the changing state of the pandemic, an invaluable source of information about the virus over the last three years is shutting down, NPR has learned.

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center plans to cease operations March 10, officials told NPR.

“It’s bittersweet,” says Lauren Gardner, an engineering professor who launched the project with one of her students on March 3, 2020. “But it’s an appropriate time to move on.

Agreed.

From the No Surprises Act front, the American Hospital Association has removed from its reports on Judge Kernodle’s February 6 opinion the erroneous statement the Judge had struck down the entire rule. The FEHBlog has redlined the Judge’s edits to the Public Health Service Act provisions in the NSA’s August 26 Independent Dispute Resolution Rule for your edification. As of Friday, February 10, the Justice Department has not noticed an appeal from this final judgment. The government has sixty days to notice an appeal.

From the public health front, the New York Times reports

In the United States, the richest mothers and their newborns are the most likely to survive the year after childbirth — except when the family is Black, according to a groundbreaking new study of two million California births. The richest Black mothers and their babies are twice as likely to die as the richest white mothers and their babies. * * *

The study, published last month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, includes nearly all the infants born to first-time mothers from 2007 to 2016 in California, the state with the most annual births. For the first time, it combines income tax data with birth, death and hospitalization records and demographic data from the Census Bureau and the Social Security Administration, while protecting identities. * * *

Rich and poor mothers were equally likely to have high-risk pregnancies, but the poor mothers were three times as likely to die — even within the same hospitals. Rich women’s pregnancies “are not only the riskiest, but also the most protected,” the paper’s authors wrote.

This finding suggests that the American medical system has the ability to save many of the lives of babies with early health risks, but that those benefits can be out of reach for low-income families.

* * *

There is clear evidence that Black patients experience racism in health care settings. In childbirth, mothers are treated differently and given different access to interventions. Black infants are more likely to survive if their doctors are Black. 

the richest white Californians in this study still gave birth to less healthy babies than the richest Swedish women. Their newborns were more likely to be premature or underweight. The two groups had roughly equal maternal death rates.

“That finding really does strongly suggest that it’s something about the care model,” said Dr. Neel Shah, chief medical officer of Maven Clinic for women’s and family health and a visiting scientist at Harvard Medical School. “We have the technology, but the model of prenatal care in the United States hasn’t really gotten an update in the last century.”

What is a new model of prenatal care? The Mayo Clinic and the ACOG, among others, have ideas.