Reuters Health News Summary

Following is a summary of current health news briefs. Swine fever spreads in Japan, 15,000 pigs to be culled

Japan's swine fever outbreak has spread to five prefectures including Osaka, and more than 10,000 pigs will be culled as part of measures to prevent further contagion, the government said on Wednesday. This is a different strain from the deadly African swine fever China has been battling, an agriculture ministry official said. Eli Lilly backs U.S. proposal on drug rebates to lower costs

Eli Lilly and Co on Wednesday embraced a U.S. government proposal to end a decades-old system of rebates drugmakers make to industry middlemen, saying it could lower the cost of insulin and other prescription drugs for patients. Lilly, along with other major insulin makers, Sanofi SA and Novo Nordisk, has been under mounting pressure from patients and politicians over the rising cost of the life-sustaining diabetes treatment. Patient being tested in Pennsylvania for possible Ebola exposure: hospital

An unidentified patient was being tested on Wednesday at a Philadelphia hospital for possibly having been exposed to the deadly Ebola virus, a hospital official said. "Preliminary testing indicates that the patient has another condition, which is likely the cause of their illness," the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania chief medical officer, Patrick Brennan, said in an emailed statement. Pharmacy stocks run low as Turkey's drug price policy hits supplies

The shelf of heart disease drugs in Hulya Akpinar's Istanbul pharmacy is almost bare, and patients seeking medicine for blood pressure and diabetes leave empty-handed. For months Akpinar says she, and pharmacists across the city, have faced a shortage of critical stocks caused by a government decision to keep the prices it pays pharmaceutical firms for medicines artificially low. Return of French farmer's case keeps Monsanto in legal spotlight

A decade-old lawsuit in which a French farmer with neurological problems accuses Monsanto of not providing adequate safety warnings for a weedkiller returns to court on Wednesday, adding to health claims faced by the Bayer-owned firm. Paul Francois, who says he fell ill after inhaling vapor from weedkiller Lasso in 2004, won rulings in 2012 and 2015 that found Monsanto liable for the intoxication, before France's top court overturned those decisions and ordered a new hearing. On abortion, Trump agenda likely leads to Supreme Court, not Congress

President Donald Trump urged lawmakers in his State of the Union address to put new limits on abortion, but partisan division in the U.S. Congress means the Supreme Court likely will set the agenda on the divisive issue, as it has for decades. Bolstered by Trump's appointment of two conservative justices, the nine-member court could soon begin to pare back abortion rights, starting with a major case from Louisiana that is one of several similar pending appeals. At least four pharma CEOs to testify at Senate drug pricing hearing

Drugmakers Pfizer Inc, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co and Sanofi SA said on Wednesday that their chief executives plan to testify at a Senate hearing on rising prescription drug prices later this month. They join Merck & Co CEO Ken Frazier, who said on Tuesday that he would testify at the Feb. 26 hearing. Roche, joining rivals, donates hemophilia drug to boost access

Switzerland's Roche will donate its new hemophilia A drug Hemlibra to a World Hemophilia Federation program, it said on Wednesday, joining rivals who also back the effort to help patients in developing countries who face treatment hurdles. Roche's donation will focus on patients who have developed resistance, or inhibitors, to current hemophilia A treatments as well as children, the Basel-based company said in a statement. U.S. sues to block Philadelphia safe drug-injection site

The U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday said it had filed a lawsuit seeking to stop a nonprofit in Philadelphia from opening what could become the nation's first supervised drug-injection site in an effort aimed at addressing opioid abuse. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Philadelphia, follows warnings by the Justice Department under Republican President Donald Trump that cities which seek to open so-called safe injection sites could face legal action. Doctors debate whether to stop calling low-risk tumors 'cancer'

Certain tumors labeled as "cancer" aren't life-threatening and should be called something else instead, some doctors believe. When patients receive a cancer diagnosis, they naturally become anxious. But with modern medicine, some tumors have become so treatable and so low-risk that unnecessary anxiety could be avoided if the medical community stopped referring to them as "cancer," says cancer surgeon Dr. Laura Esserman of the University of California, San Francisco.