Reuters Health News Summary

Following is a summary of current health news briefs. J&J blockbuster loses ground to biosimilars despite Quebec court ruling

Johnson & Johnson's Remicade, a blockbuster drug that treats autoimmune disorders, has steadily lost market share among patients enrolled in the Canadian province of Quebec's public drug program, even after a court ruling reinstated full coverage in January, a Reuters analysis of government data shows. The plan's administrator stopped covering Remicade, J&J unit Janssen's version of the drug infliximab, for some new patients in February 2017, in favor of cheap near-copies called biosimilars, mainly Pfizer Inc's version of infliximab, called Inflectra. In January, a Quebec court ordered it to resume coverage. Climate change exposes future generations to life-long health harm

A child born today faces multiple and life-long health harms from climate change - growing up in a warmer world with risks of food shortages, infectious diseases, floods and extreme heat, a major global study has found. Climate change is already harming people's health by increasing the number of extreme weather events and exacerbating air pollution, according to the study published in The Lancet medical journal. And if nothing is done to mitigate it, its impacts could burden an entire generation with disease and illness throughout their lives. N.Y. insurance regulator notifies opioid makers, distributors of enforcement action: sources

New York's insurance regulator has formally notified a group of opioid manufacturers and distributors that it will launch a civil enforcement action against them for contributing towards a rise in health insurance premiums in the state, said two sources familiar with the matter. The New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) has sent letters to around 23 opioid manufacturers and distributors, notifying them that the regulator would begin the process to hold a hearing on the issue in an administrative proceeding, the sources said. Apple Watch detects irregular heartbeats in U.S. study

Apple Inc's Heart study, the largest yet to explore the role of wearable devices in identifying potential heart problems, found the device could accurately detect atrial fibrillation, the most common type of irregular heartbeat, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday. The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), come as technology companies increasingly strike up partnerships with drugmakers as a way to gather large amounts of real-time health data on individuals. China says plague outbreak risk minimal after two new cases in Beijing

Chinese health officials say the risk of an outbreak of pneumonic plague is minimal after two new cases were confirmed this week in Beijing, the official China Daily said on Thursday. Two patients from Inner Mongolia were quarantined after being diagnosed with the highly infectious and often fatal disease, health authorities in the Chaoyang district of the capital said on Tuesday. Vertex deal with Wales expands cystic fibrosis treatment coverage to all of UK

Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc's drugs for lung condition cystic fibrosis will now be available to patients across the UK after the company reached a pricing deal with Wales on Wednesday. The U.S. drugmaker has already reached similar agreements with the National Health Service in Northern Ireland, England and Scotland. Second surgery for many ovarian cancers found ineffective

Going back into the operating room for surgery to help a woman whose ovarian cancer has reappeared may not help her live longer - instead, it might shorten her life, according to an international study of 485 women. "I do think this study will decrease the number" of such surgeries that now appear to be unnecessary for many women, said Dr. Robert Coleman of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, lead author of the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Antibiotic-resistant infections killing twice as many Americans as once thought

Nearly twice as many people are dying in the United States from antibiotic-resistant infections than previously believed, U.S. health officials said on Wednesday, as so-called "superbugs" alarm experts with their rate of growth and spread. Issuing its first comprehensive report into the growing health threat in six years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it had determined that 2.8 million antibiotic resistant infections occur each year, killing 35,000 people. FDA panel votes against Lilly-Boehringer Ingelheim's diabetes drug

Independent experts on an FDA advisory panel on Wednesday voted against the use of an already approved diabetes drug from Eli Lilly and Co and Boehringer Ingelheim as an add-on to insulin therapy in patients with type 1 diabetes. Empagliflozin belongs to a class of drugs called SGLT2 inhibitors, like Johnson & Johnson's Invokana and AstraZeneca Plc's Farxiga, which lower blood sugar by increasing the excretion of glucose through urine. Genome sequencing in newborns raises ethical issues

Screening newborns for health risks using genomic sequencing can raise ethical and equity questions, the authors of a new paper warn. Testing newborns for a handful of specific childhood conditions is already commonplace in the U.S. "Newborn screening is often done without parental permission and has been justified on the grounds that the direct benefits to the child greatly outweigh the harms," said Dr. Lainie Friedman Ross of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago in Illinois, who co-authored the case study in Pediatrics, November 12.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)